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A Critique of the Argument from Introspection
Consciousness and Free Will:
A Critique of the Argument from Introspection
Gregg Caruso Corning Community College In the free will debate, libertarians have put a great deal of emphasis on our conscious feeling of freedom and our introspective abilities. In fact, many liber- tarians have suggested that our introspection of the decision-making process, along with our strong feeling of freedom, provides some kind of evidence for the existence of free will. As Ledger Wood describes the libertarian argument: Most advocates of the free will doctrine believe that the mind is directly aware of its freedom in the very act of making a decision, and thus that freedom is an immediate datum of our introspective awareness. “I feel myself free, therefore , I am free,” runs the simplest and perhaps the most compelling of the arguments for freedom (1941: 387). We can call this argument the introspective argument for free will. The introspective argument essentially maintains that, upon introspec- tion, we do not seem to be causally determined—instead, we feel that our actions and decisions are freely decided by us—hence, we must be free. Libertarians, especially agent-causal theorists, take this in- trospective datum as their main evidence in support of free will.^1 This kind of argument only works, however, if we assume the data is veridical. But, as we’ll see, there is reason to doubt the reliability of such introspective evidence. How do we know that our feeling of freedom isn’t an illusion? How do we know that what we introspect is accurate? Libertarians seldom question the “I feel myself free, therefore, I am free” argument. In fact, the introspective argument can be found throughout the literature. Given this, it is important that we investigate both the role of consciousness and the accuracy of introspection. Perhaps a closer examination of these issues will reveal that the nature of consciousness, rather than supporting free will further impugns it.
I. Consciousness and Free Will
Although libertarians put a great deal of emphasis on conscious- ness when it comes to introspecting our own freedom, they ironi- cally overlook the importance of consciousness when it comes to explaining its role in producing free actions. Timothy O’Connor,
Gregg Caruso for example, seems to be aware of this shortcoming when he writes: Something the philosopher ought to be able to provide some general light on is how consciousness figures into the equation. It is a remarkable feature of most accounts of free will that they give no essential role to conscious awareness. One has the impression that an intelligent automata could conceivably satisfy the conditions set by these accounts—something that is very counterintuitive (2000: 122). I share O’Connor’s surprise at the fact that consciousness has not played a larger role in accounts of free will, especially given the obvious importance of conscious awareness. It truly is counterintuitive to think that one could exercise free will while at the same time being wholly unaware that they are doing so. An intelligent automaton cannot and should not be the paradigm of a free agent. One could even argue that it is logically inconceivable to imagine an automaton —a creature that lacks all conscious awareness—that has freedom.^2 If libertarian accounts of freedom wish to be successful, then, they need to show that one of the functions of consciousness is that it somehow exercises free will.^3 Given the requirement of conscious awareness, it is a sad state of affairs when libertarians like O’Connor dedicate no more than a few lines to the issue. O’Connor himself only presents one, very vague proposal. He claims: The agency theorist can conjecture that a function of biological conscious- ness, in its specifically human (and probably certain other mammalian) manifestations, is to subserve the very agent-causal capacity I sketched in previous chapters (2000: 122). Beyond this, O’Connor doesn’t explain how or in what way con- sciousness subserves agent-causal powers. And after an exhaustive examination of the literature, I have been unable to find any substan- tial account of the role consciousness plays in libertarian freedom. I can only conclude, then, that libertarianism lacks a complete story. On the one hand they appeal to our conscious feeling of freedom as evidence of free will, while on the other hand they neglect to explain the role and importance of consciousness. O’Connor’s comments simply amount to the following two claims: (1) That the “self-determining capacity [required for lib- ertarian freedom] strictly requires conscious awareness” (2000: 122); and (2) that somehow consciousness aids in this capacity. I point this out only to expose one (often overlooked) problem with libertarianism—they have provided us with nothing but a promissory note when it comes to the crucial question of explaining the role of consciousness in the exercise of agent-causal powers. Returning, however, to the introspective argument, from the fact that
Gregg Caruso amount to the claim that all mental states are conscious and that such con- sciousness is infallible. Essentially this is the belief in the transparency and infallibility of consciousness.^5 From a first person point of view these two theses seem to make sense. We are conscious of our mental states in a way that seems, at least subjectively, to be direct, immediate, and infallible. What we need to investigate here then is whether our phenomenol- ogy, which seems to support these two theses, is accurate or not. I will argue that it is not. From a first-person point of view, it may seem as though we are aware of all our mental states—including mental reason- ing and decision making—in an immediate, direct, and infallible way, but from a third-person point of view we can often see that this is not the case. I believe that it is partly because consciousness appears transparent from the first-person point of view that we impart so much power to the conscious will. If it turns out, however, that consciousness is not trans- parent then the introspective argument for free will would lose its force.
II. Mentality and Consciousness
Let us begin with the claim that all mental states are conscious states. This conception of mentality and consciousness not only claims that conscious- ness is an essential property of mental states, but also that consciousness is the mark of the mental. For on the Cartesian concept of mind, what makes a state a mental state is its being a conscious state. States that are not conscious are also not mental. This, however, has significant theoretical drawbacks. Some, like David Rosenthal (2005), have argued that if consciousness is what makes a state a mental state, consciousness will not only be an intrin- sic, nonrelational property of all mental states, it will also be impossible to analyze. Since the Cartesian concept of mind tacitly conflates mentality and consciousness—thereby making consciousness essential to all mental states—no reductive explanation of consciousness can be given in terms of other higher-level cognitive or mental processes (see Rosenthal, 1986, 2002). If this is true, then any theory of consciousness that equates mind and consciousness faces a serious explanatory problem. But what is equally troubling (or perhaps even more troubling) is what accepting this equiva- lence means for understanding the mind itself, not only consciousness. If we were to equate mind and consciousness, we would then have to understand mental processes in terms of consciousness. “So accepting the equivalence would also prevent us from ever developing an informative account of mind” (Rosenthal, 2002: 237). We would be unable to investigate mental processes without at the same time investigating conscious processes. This, I believe, is not only theoretically unacceptable it is also empirically unjustifiable!
A Critique of the Argument from Introspection There is more than ample reason to believe that not all mental states are conscious states. Many types of mental states—such as thoughts, desires, beliefs, judgments, and intentions—often occur without being conscious. Both common sense and cognitive science typically posits mental states that are not conscious to explain certain behaviors and cognitive capacities. The most widely accepted of these unconscious mental states are intentional states. There are not only clinical and experimental results which provide good reason to hold that beliefs and desires exist that are not conscious, but everyday folk psychology makes much use of intentional states that are not conscious to explain the actions of others.^6 One could even argue that the majority of our intentional states are probably nonconscious.^7 The work of Timothy Wilson, John Bargh, Ap Dijksterhuis, Benjamin Libet, and others,^8 has shown that “the same higher mental processes that have traditionally served as quintessential examples of choice and free will—such as goal pursuits, judgment, and interpersonal behavior—have been shown recently to occur in the absence of conscious choice or guid- ance” (Bargh & Ferguson, 2000: 926). It is no longer believed that only lower-level processing can occur outside the reach of consciousness. There is now growing evidence that a great deal of higher-level mental functioning is also nonconscious. Psychologists and cognitive scientists have accumulated a great deal of evidence for determinism by demonstrating that high-level mental and behavioral processes “can proceed without the intervention of conscious deliberation and choice” (Bargh & Ferguson, 2000: 925). All of this mounting research, I believe, indicates that high level unconscious cognitive states—states that are best described as mental —actively, and frequently, play a role in human behavior.^9 The Cartesian thesis, then, that all mental states are conscious states—though perhaps supported by phenomenology—has multiple strikes against it and is probably false.^10
III. Knowing Thy Self: Consciousness and Self-Reports
In addition to the assumption that all mental states are conscious, liber- tarian and folk psychological accounts of consciousness usually make the related assumption that consciousness provides us with infallible knowledge of our (conscious) mental states. The claim of infallibility is another part of the traditional Cartesian concept of mind.^11 From a first-person point of view, this assumption seems to makes sense. Who else, we feel, is in a better position to know which mental states we are in than ourselves? It is often assumed, almost at a definitional level, that we are immedi- ately, directly, and infallibly connected to the content of our own minds. From a first-person point of view, it never seems as though consciousness
A Critique of the Argument from Introspection lose their ability to form memories of new experiences (Sacks, 1987).^15 Although it may be tempting to think such confabulation is limited to these rare occasions, some theorists have suggested that similar confabu- lation occurs throughout everyday life (see, e.g., Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Gazzaniga & LeDoux, 1978; Wilson, 2002). These theorists argue that our conscious selves often do not fully know why we do what we do and thus have to confabulate stories and create explanations. In one of the most famous papers on the subject, Nisbett and Wilson (1977) placed subjects in identical situations save for the fact that one or two key features were varied. They observed that although these key features influenced people’s judgments or behavior, when asked to explain why they responded the way they did, subjects remained unaware of the varied features and instead con- fabulated different explanations for their behavior. Studies like this seriously question the accuracy of consciousness awareness, because they reveal that consciousness does not provide us with transparent and infallible knowl- edge of our own minds. We may consciously think we are doing something because of reason X , when in reality we are doing it because of reason Y. 16
IV. Conclusion
What does this mean for the introspective argument for free will? I believe it shows that we cannot rely on our conscious experience alone to determine what the true causes of our actions are. We are often unaware of important causal determinates. The fact that we do not feel causally de- termined, or that we are not consciously aware of the various (internal and external) influences on our behavior, does not mean such determinates do not exist. Worse still, if consciousness can confabulate and/or misrepresent the causes for our choices and/or actions, then to rely on such conscious data to infer our own freedom would be a mistake. Whatever persuasive- ness the introspective argument originally had depended on the assumption that we had direct, infallible access to our own decision-making process. The argument assumes that consciousness reveals everything about our mental functioning, or at least everything relevant to the issue at hand. If what I’ve argued here is correct, this is not the case. What we are con- scious of—and hence, what we can report on—is not always in line with what is otherwise going on mentally. If it turns out, as recent research suggests, that a great deal of mental activity is controlled by unconscious mental states, and that we can also misrepresent and confabulate the states we are in, the libertarian argument from introspection loses all its force.
Gregg Caruso
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A Critique of the Argument from Introspection being aware of deterministic causes may explain why we believe no such causes exist, but it does not fully explain the phenomenology of agent-causation. To fully explain why we feel free, I believe we will also have to examine the phenomenology surrounding our feeling of “self-causation” and our feeling of “intentional control” over our actions. The apparent transparency and infallibility of consciousness, I maintain, is one of four main phenomenological features of consciousness that cre- ate the illusion of free will. For a full account of how the cognitive illusion of free will is created, see my Free Will and Conscious Illusion: A Determinist Account of the Cognitive Illusion of Free Will (in progress). (^5) I have elsewhere called this the “Cartesian assumption” and have presented arguments against it. See Caruso, 2005. (^6) In fact, the majority of philosophers, pace John Searle (1990, 1992), now agree that there are nonconscious intentional states. (^7) As Timothy Wilson puts it, the view “that consciousness is the tip of the mental iceberg…[was] short of the mark by quite a bit—it may be more the size of a snowball on top of that iceberg” (2002: 6). (^8) See, Wilson, 2002; Bargh & Ferguson, 2000; Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Bargh, 1990, 1994, 1996, 1997; Bargh, Barndollar, Gollwitzer, & Trotschel, 2001; Chartrand & Bargh, 1996; Bechara, H. Damsio, Tranel, & A. Damasio, 1997; Di- jksterhuis, 2004; Dijksterhuis, Knippenberg, Spears, Postmes, Stapel, Koomen, & Scheepers, 1998; Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2000, 2003; Dijksterhuis & Knippenberg, 1998; Steele & Aronson, 1995, and Libet, 1985, 1987, 1993. (^9) I should point out that when talking about nonconscious mental states, I do not mean simply to be talking about dispositional states: states that are disposed to be occurrent conscious states. I mean to be making the stronger claim that these are occurrent nonconscious states—states that influence behavior and interact with other mental states, both conscious and nonconscious. (^10) Timothy Wilson has even compared it to “Descartes’ error” of Cartesian dualism. He writes: “Descartes made a related error that is less well known but no less egregious. Not only did he endow the mind with a special status that was unrelated to physical laws; he also restricted the mind to consciousness. The mind consists of all that people consciously think, he argued, and nothing else. This equa- tion of thinking and consciousness eliminates, with one swift stroke, any possibility of nonconscious thought—a move that was called the ‘Cartesian catastrophe’ by Arthur Koestler and ‘one of the fundamental blunders made by the human mind’ by Lancelot Whyte. Koestler rightly notes that this idea led to ‘an impoverishment of psychology which it took three centuries to remedy’” (2002: 9-10). (^11) Although Descartes famously entertained the possibility that the content of my mental states may not match reality, he never entertained the possibility that my own mental states may diverge from my conscious awareness of them. Descartes claims in numerous places that one cannot be mistaken about how things seem to them to be in consciousness (see, e.g., CSM II, 19; AT VII, 29). For Descartes, our judgments about our mental states are certain and infallible. (^12) As Rosenthal points out: “[C]onsciousness does not always represent our
Gregg Caruso mental states accurately. Consciousness seems infallible because it never shows itself to be mistaken and it’s tempting to think that there’s no other way to know what mental states one is in. But consciousness is not the only way to determine what mental state one is in, and there is sometimes compelling independent evidence that goes against what consciousness tell us” (Rosenthal, 2004: 27). (^13) For a good review, see Wilson 2003. (^14) See Wilson (2003) for more on the limits of introspective reports. With regard to emotions research, for example, Wilson writes: “With the advent of im- plicit measures and new theories about brain functioning, many researchers now argue that some feelings are inaccessible to conscious awareness, not necessarily because of repression, but because of the architecture of the mind” (Wilson, 2003: 134; see also, LeDoux, 1996; Wilson, 2002). (^15) For a good review of confabulation, which includes examples from split-brain patients, people suffering from organic amnesia, and people acting out posthypnotic suggestion, see Wilson, 2002: ch.5. (^16) In their original paper, Nisbett and Wilson (1977) argued that people often make inaccurate reports about the causes of their responses because there is little or no introspective access to higher order cognitive processes. They theorized that when people try to give introspective reports on the causes of their behavior, what they are really doing is making reasonable inferences about what the causes must have been, not giving direct introspective reports of the actual causes. A number of critics accurately pointed out that this thesis was far too extreme (Smith & Miller, 1978; Ericsson & Simon, 1980; Gavanski & Hoffman, 1987), and Wilson has since modified his views (see, Wilson & Stone, 1985; Wilson, 2002). My position is that we often do have direct access to our own mental states (i.e., our higher cognitive processes), but that the way we are aware of such states allows for the possibility of misrepresentation and confabulation. I further maintain that we need to distin- guish between ordinary consciousness and introspective consciousness. I believe that error can occur at both levels and that people often conflate the two types of mistakes
Gregg Caruso
