The Role of Consciousness in Free Action

Abstract

For Wiley Companion to Free Will) IntroductionIt is easy to prompt the intuition that free will and consciousness have something importantly to do with one another. Consider cases such as the following:Case 1: Your spouse accuses you of having broken your commitment to the family diet by stealing cake from the refrigerator in the middle of the night, and he is in possession of damning videographic evidence. In your defense, you point to your long history of sleepwalking, and suggest that you make an appointment with a sleep doctor.Case 2: On a weekend, you get behind the wheel of your car and head to the grocery store. As you drive, your mind drifts, until you suddenly realize that you are not on your way to the store after all, but have instead followed the route you take to work each weekday.In neither of these cases does it seem that your action (eating a piece of cake, driving to work) is the product of your free will, and this fact can be explained, in both cases, in terms of your lack of conscious awareness of what you were doing. But it is not always so intuitively clear what type or degree of conscious awareness is required for an action to count as free, as exemplified in the following cases:Case 3: During a game of basketball, you steal the ball and make a fast break down the court. As you set up to make a shot, you spot an open teammate out of the corner of your eye, and without thinking dish the ball to her so she can complete an unimpeded lay-up.Case 4: As you watch an advertisement on television for a charity organization, you resolve to make a generous donation, and this in contrast to your typical stinginess. Later you learn that the advertisers flashed the word 'GIVE' for a duration too brief for you to have consciously processed.In Cases 3 and 4, your actions (passing a basketball, making a donation) are significantly shaped by non-conscious processes of which you were unaware at the time of acting. As a consequence, should we say that they were not done freely? This question is difficult to answer in the absence of a general theory of the relationship between consciousness and free will. And no consensus currently exists regarding this general theory. The reason is that the cognitive function of consciousness, on the one hand, and the necessary conditions for freedom, on the other, are matters of considerable controversy.Regarding the cognitive function of consciousness, at least the five following options have contemporary adherents (roughly in descending order of how much cognitive weight consciousness bears):The Selfhood Role: A subject, properly speaking, is identical with a conscious subject; non-conscious states and processes constitute the subject only derivatively. (While held paradigmatically by robust realists about the self, this view is by no means restricted to them. It can also be held by those who identify the self with the stream of consciousness, or with a narrative constructed out of conscious experiences.)The Self-awareness Role: Consciousness alone affords subjects with priv...