Max Bennett is a distinguished Australian neuroscientist, Peter Hacker an Oxford philosopher and leading authority on Wittgenstein. A book resulting from their collaboration, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, has received high praise. According to the Blackwell website, G.H. von Wright asserts that it 'will certainly, for a long time to come, be the most important contribution to the mind-body problem that there is'; and Sir Anthony Kenny says it 'shows that the claims made on behalf of cognitive science are ill-founded'. M.R. (...) Bennett & P.M.S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. (shrink)

In this challenging book, David Hodgson takes a fresh approach to the question of free will, contending that close consideration of human rationality and human consciousness shows that together they give us free will, in a robust and indeterministic sense, and in a way that is consistent with what science tells us about the world.

In this book, Hodgson presents a clear and compelling case against today's orthodox mechanistic view of the brain-mind, and in favor of the view that "the mind matters." In the course of the argument he ranges over such topics as consciousness, informal reasoning, computers, evolution, and quantum indeterminancy and non-locality. Although written from a philosophical viewpoint, the book has important implications for the sciences concerned with the brain-mind problem. At the same time, it is largely non-technical, and thus accessible to (...) the non-specialist reader. (shrink)

Current developments in the sciences of the brain and mind sometimes seem to suggest that criminal conduct is a symptom of brain disorder or illness that should be treated rather than punished. This paper argues that the insights of these sciences should be taken very seriously by lawyers, but not to the detriment of common-sense ideas of responsibility or of their incorporation into the legal categories used in the criminal law.

David Hodgson[1] It’s widely asserted by scientists and philosophers that our decisions and actions are wholly determined by physical processes of our brains; and many also assert that this means we cannot have free will and cannot, in any real sense, be responsible for what we do. In recent times, this has led to some questioning of the basis of criminal..

David Chalmers distinguishes the hard problem of consciousness -- why should a physical system give rise to conscious experiences at all -- with what he calls the easy problems, the explanation of how cognitive systems, including human brains, perform various cognitive functions. He argues that the easy problems are easy because the performance of any function can be explained by specifying a mechanism that performs the function. This article argues that conscious experiences have a role in the performance by human (...) beings of some cognitive functions, that can't be realised by mechanisms of the kind studied by the objective sciences; and that accordingly some of Chalmers’ easy problems will not be fully solved unless and until the hard problem is solved. (shrink)

This article looks at two approaches to the human brain and to the causation of behaviour: the objective approach of neuroscience, which treats the brain as a physical system operating in accordance with physical laws of general application; and the subjective approach of folk psychology, which treats people, and thus their brains and minds, as making choices or decisions on the basis of beliefs, desires, etc. It suggests three ways in which these two approaches might be related, two physicalist and (...) one non-physicalist; and argues, with reference to ethical and legal issues,ues that there are strong commonsense grounds for preferring the non-physicalist alternative, and that science does not justify its rejection. It is suggested that a considerable onus of proof lies on proponents of physicalist approaches, having regard to the implications of such approaches for important issues of justice and human rights.In this paper, I outline two approaches to the human brain, involving two different views of the causation of human behaviour; and I consider how these two approaches might be linked or related. The first is the objective approach of neuroscience, which treats the human brain as a physical object, operating in accordance with the same physical laws as other physical objects. The second is the subjective approach of folk psychology, which we apply both in our ordinary interactions with other people and in our thinking about our own behaviour; and which treats people as choosing or deciding what to do on the basis of their beliefs, desires and so on. (shrink)

Fifty years ago the philosopher Wilfred Sellars identified two images of “man”, which he called respectively the “manifest image” and the “scientific image”; and he considered whether and how these two images could be reconciled. In this paper, I will very briefly look at the distinction drawn by Sellars and at his suggestions for reconciliation of these images. I will suggest that a broad distinction as suggested by Sellars can indeed usefully be drawn, but that the distinction can be more (...) helpfully characterised than it was by Sellars. I will argue that there are more ways of reconciling the two images than those proposed by Sellars. And I will elaborate on what I think are the most promising lines along which the reconciliation could take place. (shrink)

I am very grateful to the commentators for their consideration of my target article. I found their comments thought-provoking and challenging, but I am not persuaded that any substantial departure is required from the views I expressed in the article. I will respond to each comment in turn, and then I will briefly review how my nine propositions have fared.

In my experience, plain persons (here meaning persons who are neither philosophers or cognitive scientists) tend to accept something like a libertarian position on free will, namely that free will exists and is inconsistent with determinism. That position is widely debunked by philosophers and cognitive scientists. My view at present is that something like this plain person's position is not only defensible but likely to be closer to the truth than opposing views. To put this to the test, I have (...) written a simple and straightforward outline of what I hope is a philosophically and scientifically respectable version of the plain person's position on free will, and have offered it for demolition by those who say such a view is untenable. My account of free will is a robust one, explicitly inconsistent with determinism and intended to support equally robust views of personal responsibility for conduct. I see three broad areas of difficulty for this account. (shrink)

DAVID HODGSON: This article supports the proposition that, if a judgment about the aesthetic merits of an artistic object can take into account and thereby be influenced by the particular quality of the object, through gestalt experiences evoked by the object, then we have free will. It argues that it is probable that such a judgment can indeed take into account and be influenced by the particular quality of the object through gestalt experiences evoked by it, so as to make (...) it probable that we do have free will. The proposition is supported by reference to two basic tricks apparently involved in conscious processes, which I call the qualia trick and the chunking trick; and it is suggested that these tricks make possible and indeed probable the existence of a third trick, which I call the selection trick. (shrink)

This is a review article about John Searle's most recent book The Rediscovery of the Mind, which criticizes it for not going far enough in its departure from orthodox materialistic views of the brain and mind. It argues that Searle's two central propositions, consciousness is irreducible and consciousness cannot cause anything that cannot be explained by the causal behaviour of neurons, are incompatible; and suggests that it is reasonable and scientifically respectable to reject the latter rather than the former.

One has it that earlier circumstances and the laws of nature uniquely determine later circumstances, and the other has it that past present and future all exist tenselessly in a ‘block universe,’ so that the passage of time and associated changes in the world are illusions or at best merely apparent.

I much appreciated Elizabeth Schier's paper on Frank Jackson's knowledge argument, published in the January 2008 issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies (Schier, 2008) -- in part, I confess, because of resonances with my gestalt argument for free will (Hodgson, 2001; 2002; 2005; 2007a,b). I would like to offer two comments on this paper.

         Many scientists and philosophers would answer nothing. According to them, the physical world operates in accordance with the laws of physics, chemistry and biology, and is closed to being affected by anything non-physical.  Thus, any effects that conscious experiences may have can only come about by virtue of physical brain processes that are associated with and perhaps constitute these experiences.          This physicalist (...) approach, however, raises the question why, if all is achieved by physical processes operating in accordance with physical laws of nature, are some of these processes associated with and possibly constitutive of subjective conscious experiences, when this association does precisely nothing. From an evolutionary viewpoint, this would not seem to make sense: the selection of consciousness through the survival and reproduction of conscious organisms strongly suggests that consciousness confers an advantage on an organism that has it.          A possible answer is that somehow conscious experiences are inevitably associated with certain advantageous physical processes, so that when these advantageous processes were selected in evolution, consciousness was selected with them. Just as, for example, a polar bear can’t have the useful warmth of its coat.. (shrink)

Hume claimed that anything that happens must either be causally determined or a matter of chance, and that a person is responsible only for choices caused by the person’s character; so that if any sense is to made of free will and responsibility, it must be on the basis that they are compatible with determinism.

They have not given much attention to something I think is significant in the book, namely its clear and forceful criticism of the morality of aspects of major religions, including Christianity and Judaism, criticism that deserves to be taken seriously by reasonable adherents of these religions.

This paper introduces a conjecture that laws of nature may be of different kinds, in particular that there may, in addition to laws which constrain outcomes (C-laws), be laws which empower systems to direct or select outcomes (E-laws) and laws which guide systems in such selections (G-laws). The paper defends this conjecture by suggesting that it is not excluded by anything we know, is plausible, and is potentially of great explanatory power.

It has been contended that we can never be truly responsible for anything we do: we do what we do because of the way we are, so we cannot be responsible for what we do unless we are responsible for the way we are; and we cannot be responsible for the way we are when we first make decisions in life, so we can never become responsible for the way we are later in life. This article argues that in our (...) consciously chosen actions we respond rationally to whole ‘gestalt’ experiences in ways that cannot be pre determined by pre choice circumstances and laws of nature and/or computational rules; and that this means we are partly responsible for what we do, even if we are not responsible for the way we are. (shrink)

Responses to my article on Dawkins and God have fallen into two classes: those that challenge my criticism of Dawkins’ atheism, and those that challenge my criticism of the morality on display in some Bible stories. I will briefly respond to those in the first class, and then those in the second class. P. J. Moss suggests I am attracted to “the Cartesian notion of mind body dualism,” and do not have regard to “the work of those philosophers of mind (...) who … see the task of the philosopher as posing the problem into a precise enough form so that it admits of scientific resolution;” and he commends the work of John Searle. I am indeed attracted to a kind of dualism. However, it is not the Cartesian dualism of “two distinct realms” rejected by Searle, but rather a dualism that accepts, as Searle does, that there are two categories of empirical reality, subjective and objective, which are mutually irreducible The Rediscovery of the Mind, pp19, 98), and that there are features of subjective reality that cannot be fully understood in terms of objective reality. In a major work published in 2001, Rationality in Action, Searle even leaves open as a reasonable possibility a view I support, namely that consciousness may be able to cause things that cannot be fully explained by the causal behaviour of neurons, and he also supports a non Humean notion of the self, as an entity that can, as a whole, consciously try to do things: see my review in Journal of Consciousness Studies 9, 92 94. In any event, my argument against Dawkins does not depend on acceptance of dualism, just on the undoubted fact that science does not yet have the first idea what objective features are necessary and sufficient to give rise to subjectivity. Robert McLaughlin makes out a reasoned case against my three suggested errors in Dawkins. It would take a book to deal fully with points of the kind he raises, but I have to be brief here. (shrink)