CONSCIOUSNESS

78 1. Philosophy
76 Can Freely Voluntary Acts Appear Without Micro-Determinism? Weisiang Huang
(Instit. of Philosophy of Mind, Taipei, Taiwan)
In Libet’s study of ‘Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary
action’ (1985), he presented that our conscious intention or decision which initiates the
action happened after the start of the cerebral processes. It seems that the conscious intention
does not really initiate an action; rather, an action is initiated by the cerebral process before
our conscious intention. In another article ‘Do We Have Free Will?’ (2002), Libet tried to
leave room for free won’t in the last 200 millisecond before the action. He introduced the conscious
veto as a control function which appears without prior unconscious processes. I think
this approach cannot really escape from determinism. Even there is a control function; we can
accept either of the two possible situations about this function. First, this control function is
still realized by a micro-mechanism which may further be initiated by other cerebral process.
Second, this control function has no underling substrate. In the first way, it is impossible for
free won’t to appear without prior unconscious processes, and it still falls into a deterministic
approach. In the second way, the free won’t seems to be something non-physical, and it
will turn into a dualistic approach. In my article, I try to accommodate these two conflicting
possibilities in a biological approach. I will introduce the levels of organization in complex
systems, and try to resolve the confliction on the surface of these two possibilities. In this
approach, I will explain how can free will be possible but at the same time constituted by a
physical substrate. P1
77 Applying Dynamical Systems Theory to the Problem of Conscious Intentional
Action Anthony Peressini (Marquette University,
Milwaukee, WI)
In this paper I consider the problem of conscious human agency and how one might make
use of the insights of dynamical systems theory (DST) in neuroscience in a way that both (a)
accords with its actual use in neuroscience, and (b) shows sensitivity to the traditional philosophical
concerns about conscious human agency and the explanatory role of common sense
(or “folk”) psychology (CSP). Philosophical uses of DST in conscious studies tend to embrace
it more as metaphor than actual scientific theory. I consider one such account, Hanna’s and
Maiese’s Embodied Minds in Action, and argue that DST isn’t at all integral to the account in
that it merely incorporates loose ideas from DST into philosophical “business as usual.” Such
philosophical applications make the natural (if obvious) use of the DST notion of emergence
in that they associate emergent properties with CSP mental states like belief and desire, so
that psychological explanations get the benefit of scientifically validated “downward causation,”
though again, only metaphorically. On the other hand, neuroscientist Walter Freeman’s
How Brains Make Up Their Minds, whose account of conscious agency is firmly and literally
grounded in his pioneering work in dynamical modeling of the brain, leaves insufficiently
addressed important philosophical questions like the causal efficacy of content and the status
CSP explanation. His discussions of emergent meso-level properties, which are higher level
than the neuronal but lower than conscious intentional states, come directly from groundbreaking
work in neurodynamics. These meso-level properties are taken to be the emergent
properties that explain behavior. Instead of the natural move of taking the emergent properties
to be mental states (propositional attitudes), Freeman’s emergents are his meso-states, and
these are the ultimate explanation of behavior. So while DST is integral via meso-emergence,
it is an unnatural application of DST in that CSP explanations are excised from his account.
This elimination of CSP’s propositional attitudes and their explanatory apparatus leaves important
philosophical holes in our account of agency and causal/explanatory efficacy of CSP.
I argue that the unnaturalness of the meso-level approach of Freeman can be mitigated in way
that does address philosophical concerns with conscious agency and CSP explanation. I propose
we understand CSP as constituting a set of constraints or boundary conditions intrinsic to
the dynamical system of the brain/body. Construed in this way we see how and why CSP has
the explanatory and predictive power it does with respect to the behavior, even if it does not
(itself) actually model the underlying causal dynamics of the behavior. Additionally, viewing