Free Will and Consciousness

A Determinist Account of the Illusion of Free Will

By (author) Gregg Caruso

Publication date:

01 May 2013

Length of book:

312 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739184400

In recent decades, with advances in the behavioral, cognitive, and neurosciences, the idea that patterns of human behavior may ultimately be due to factors beyond our conscious control has increasingly gained traction and renewed interest in the age-old problem of free will. In this book, Gregg D. Caruso examines both the traditional philosophical problems long associated with the question of free will, such as the relationship between determinism and free will, as well as recent experimental and theoretical work directly related to consciousness and human agency. He argues that our best scientific theories indeed have the consequence that factors beyond our control produce all of the actions we perform and that because of this we do not possess the kind of free will required for genuine or ultimate responsibility. It is further argued that the strong and pervasive belief in free will, which the author considers an illusion, can be accounted for through a careful analysis of our phenomenology and a proper theoretical understanding of consciousness. Indeed, the primary goal of this book is to argue that our subjective feeling of freedom, as reflected in the first-person phenomenology of agentive experience, is an illusion created by certain aspects of our consciousness.

Chapter 1: The Problem of Free Will: A Brief Introduction and Outline of Position
Chapter 2: Against Libertarianism
Chapter 3: Against Compatibilism
Chapter 4: Consciousness and Free Will (I): Automaticity and the Adaptive Unconscious
Chapter 5: Consciousness and Free Will (II): Transparency, Infallibility, and the Higher-Order Thought Theory
Chapter 6: Consciousness and Free Will (III): Intentional States, Spontaneity, and Action Initiation
Chapter 7: Consciousness and Free Will (IV): Self-Consciousness and Our Sense of Agency

This admirable book enriches the philosophical debate about free will by bringing to bear a probing discussion of consciousness along with a rigorous survey of relevant work in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience. The result is a compelling theoretical and empirical defense of determinism, which does justice as few treatments ever have to the crucial difference between genuine freedom and the mere subjective appearance of freedom. Having argued convincingly that our will is not actually free, Caruso develops a perceptive account of the conscious phenomenology that gives rise to our persistent impression that we do act freely. Anybody interested in free will, consciousness, or human agency will want to read this book.