[과제] On Thomas Huxley's Epiphenomenalism

이제 웬만하면 쓰는 글들을 블로그에도 업데이트 해둬야겠다. 수업 과제부터 고고링

 

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Issue: on the incompleteness of Huxley's explanation with regards to free will

 

In his discussion of the hypothesis that animals are automata, Huxley proposes a version of epiphenomenalism, which can be summarized as the view that "the consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working." An important ramification of this view is that consciousness does not possess causal powers per se: "volitions do not enter into the chain of causation of their actions at all," Huxley writes.

 

Naturally, such a viewpoint begs the question of free will--can we say that brutes with consciousness have free will? Huxley's response is that we can still ascribe free will to conscious beings, insofar as they are unconstrained from carrying out the contents of their desires and volition--this being despite the fact that those desires and volitions are simply products of molecular changes in the brain as well.

 

This response, however, rests on a particular conception of free will, defined as follows: "For an agent is free when there is nothing to prevent him from doing that which he desires to do." Such a negative definition of freedom is indeed convenient, but as far as I am concerned, it does not engage with the core metaphysical dilemma of free will, and therefore only gives rise to a half-baked answer.

 

For instance, we can say that a rock in free-fall or a stream of river flowing downwards without obstacles is also "free" in the same sense as the definition above, only if we are willing to ascribe the nebulous term "volition" or "desire" to the gravitational force affecting the rock and the waters. Saying that rocks and waters have volition might sound weird, but that is exactly what I think is really at stake: if, as Huxley says, volition and desire are simply products of molecular changes of a system, then what is the factor that distinguishes conscious volition and desire from say, the repulsive force between two magnets? In other words, what really matters for the ascription of free will is not so much the existence or absence of external constraints (as Huxley's negative definition suggests), but what the conditions are for which we can call some natural impetus "desire" or "volition," and thereby ascribe the role of "agent" to the entity in question. As such, I believe that Huxley's answer to the question of free will in epiphenomenalism is incomplete, at least in the discussed parts of the paper.

 

A possible answer:

A provisional solution I would like to propose, then, is to consider being caused by itself (causa sui) as the constitutive condition for free will (new definition). In the case of waters and rocks, those entities in and of themselves did not provide the causal powers for their impetuses. What distinguishes the notion of volition and desire from such forces is that the brain and the body of an agent together systematically form the impetus for the agent's next behavior and actions. While the exact notion of "being caused by itself" indeed has yet to be flushed out, I believe that this consideration is at least more to the point with regards to debates on free will, determinism, and mental causation, as it directly questions our understanding of notions such as volition and desire. Even under this conception, we can still give the same positive answer to the possibility of ascribing free will under an epiphenomenalist understanding of mental properties, as Huxley wished.