Consciousness
Opinion is wildly divided on how to account
for the self-reflective consciousness that we humans experience. On the one
hand, some see the rapid advances in the neurosciences and extrapolate to a
future where consciousness is also explained in neurobiological terms. The emergent-monism/non-reductive physicalism
of Clayton, Murphy and Peacocke head in this
direction. Others see the problem as intractable. Russell Stannard sees no easy way to reconcile our experience of
self and the passage of ‘mental-time’ with the block universe model of
space-time. Keith Ward finds arguments for the immaterial nature of mental
images to be persuasive, and given this, the logical possibility that human
agency may also be rooted in the immaterial. I myself am undecided, but
guardedly optimistic about future emergent-physicalist
attempts to account for both mental images and subjective experience/qualia.
While the topic of consciousness invariably
shows up in conversations about human agency and causation, a particular
commitment on the nature of consciousness does not directly affect my
discussion of agency. With or without an additional immaterial mind, I believe
that a purely physicalist account of agency will
still show human minds to be very significant agents in the world.
But minds do not act in isolation. When
describing real-life scenarios involving people, we should probably expect to
list a plethora of inter-related agents at various scales, from atomic, to
genetic, to person, to group, to ecosystem, with at best fuzzy boundaries
between them. But if we were to rank each of them by the quantity of effects traceable
to each, I think the conscious human person would invariably be at the top of
the list.
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| Contributed by: Adrian
Wyard
|
