Free Will and Consciousness

A Determinist Account of the Illusion of Free Will

By (author) Gregg Caruso

Publication date:

23 February 2012

Length of book:

312 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739171363

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

Free Will and Consciousness is an effort to deal with a series of complex topics such as social and cognitive psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and their relationship with consciousness and free will in a small number of pages. . . . This book is therefore a good example of interdisciplinary research. ... Overall, this book is highly recommend for upper undergraduate courses, graduate students, and researchers. It is tightly organized. The vast amount of literature reviewed by the author makes it a good introduction to the metaphysics of free will and the debate about cognitive illusion of free will. The arguments featured were both robust and convincing with the author achieving a successful concatenation of them in order to uphold his deterministic account.