Free Will: Key to Consciousness? | Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Walter, I am fascinated by free will and I have an obsession to understand what consciousness is all about, and clearly there's an articulation between the two. How do you see that relationship working? What can we learn about each from the other? Well, I think we can learn a lot about free will by thinking about consciousness and its role in our decisions about whether to think of people as free and morally responsible. How so? In most people's view, consciousness is crucial to free will and responsibility. Take a simple example. You want some sugar in your coffee, I see a container of white powder, I put some white powder in your coffee, and you drink it and die because it's poison. I didn't know. If I'm not aware of the world around me and the facts, then I'm not going to be held responsible because of that lack of consciousness or awareness of the facts. So that's, I think, a pretty simple example where you need consciousness. Now why? Because without the consciousness of what that powder is, I can't control whether or not you die. If I know whether it's poison, then I can determine whether you die or not. If I don't know whether it's poison, I'm not going to be able to determine whether you die or not. And when you say no, that has all the richness of consciousness. You have to know what it looks like, what it does, and what its actions. You have to have a sense of forward time. You can't just be thinking in the present. There's a huge amount of cognitive information that goes into that when you're using the word consciousness in that context. Exactly. And it involves consciousness of particular facts, but also consciousness in general. So if I'm just sleepwalking when I do something, then I'm really not conscious at all. I'm not going to be held responsible. And the law recognizes that. So the other thing that's worth bringing up is that it's not enough to be conscious, but you also have to have your actions caused by your consciousness. Here's an example. I used to have a house in Hanover, and students would jog by every morning. It drove me crazy because I'm sitting there trying to have breakfast with my family, and these obnoxious kids are running by and waving at me. So let's imagine that one morning I decide, you know, there's one kid that always goes by at 9 o'clock. I'm going to kill him. Right? I'm going to pull out of my driveway and run them over as they come by at 9 o'clock. And then I look at my watch and it says 8 o'clock. Well, I say, I'm going to go get some cereal and some milk. I'm going to have breakfast before I kill the kid. I pull out, and sure enough, as I'm pulling out of the driveway, I hit him, okay? And kill him. And then I go, darn, I forgot about Daylight Saving Time. It's really 9 o'clock. Then I intended to kill the kid by running them over at the mouth of my driveway at 9 o'clock, and I did, right? But am I responsible for murder? No. Clearly not. Why not? Because although I had the intention, I was conscious of having the intention, that's not what caused me to leave the driveway. I was just trying to go get some cereal. So it's not enough to be conscious. It's that your actions have to be caused by. You need both. There has to be a consciousness and a causal relation between the action and the consciousness. That's where the trick really is, though. How do you explain how something as airy-fairy, as mental and non-physical as consciousness can cause this physical body to move around the way it does? How does the mental cause the physical? And that's a big philosophical problem for a lot of people. Does free will, an analysis of free will, help us with that problem? I think we've got to solve that problem before we can analyze free will. Because to say that you have free will is to say that your actions are the result of a will that was free. Right. But you have to have mental causation. But it's got to result from. You've got to have the action, the result of the will. Yeah, but just going in one way, I would argue that maybe by trying to understand free will, you can go the other way, too, to understand mental causation. Because that's not obvious. You say we've got to understand it. Well, that's hard to understand. Sure. You've got to understand them both together. Because the whole point of philosophy is to build a worldview where everything fits together with everything else. And so you need to adjust one to fit the other. So you're absolutely right. In the end, you need to understand free will and consciousness and mental causation in a bundle and formulate a theory that shows how they all fit together.