Part 1 Here

The Conditions For Self hood

If we take the fear response we investigated in part II for example, we analysed this and discovered we did not control the process. We might see similar behaviour to our fear response in dogs, perhaps in response to fireworks or a gun shot.

At this point we might question whether or not a self was responsible for this. As we illustrated earlier in part II, we are inconsistent in the way we attributed the cause of emotions. On one hand we might describe ourselves as being afraid and attributing this to ourselves, yet on the other, we think of it as an automatic response that we have no control over.

As far as the dog is concerned we have to ask the question of whether we consider it as a rational agent in charge of its (dogged?) emotions, or as being subject to the changing environment? Naturally, the former sounds completely absurd. However, the latter description seems to fit both the animal and even ourselves.

We might go on to draw other comparisons between ourselves and animals. For instance, we can start to question whether or not the dog would have some extra ability to sense or perhaps even control the amount of glycogen that is synthesised into ATP, to quote an example from part II.

Whilst we certainly cannot know what the dog's experience is like, it is not beyond the bounds of reason to suggest that there are many processes that happen outside the stream of phenomenal experience that the dog is conscious of. Moreover, it again raises the question of whether or not the dog has any kind of rudimentary self that is aware?

The hard facts seem to suggest that dogs have no self awareness. For example they cannot pass the mirror test but chimps can. Whilst this is a contentious area of study it is certainly fascinating.

The implications that we have to look at are whether or not 'being aware' is a property of self hood. We might like to consider a range from the simplest single cell organism all the way up to humans.

We might ask ourselves at what point do we draw a line and say something is actually aware?

Is a virus aware that it is replicating?

Are insects aware of where their food is?

Is a gecko aware of whether the mosquito is looking the other way?

Is a dog aware of an intruder outside?

This leads us to question what we mean by 'being aware'. If we use it as a descriptive term we can say an insect is aware of where the food is because it is moving towards it. However, if we mean having a complex mental life consisting in being consciousness then we are talking about something else entirely.

Essentially, we can break down the meaning of the word 'aware' as being a predicate of descriptive language, or as being phenomenally conscious. When we use 'aware' as a predicate, i.e. the insect is aware of x, we need to distinguish between this purely descriptive use and what we mean by consciously being aware of mental phenomena - phenomenal consciousness. 

It is quite legitimate to believe that if we were to strip down the functions of the brain it would eventually lead to a more rudimentary kind of phenomenal consciousness. We might attribute this to chimpanzees but we may think twice before we attributed it to insects.

The key point here, is that these kinds of reasoning are nothing more than mere speculation. All we are doing is trying to validate our model of the world by means of inference. However, we have no means of validation for such inferences and we are left facing the aptly named 'hard problem' of consciousness (See Nagel, 1979). 

Whilst our inferences about consciousness fit our model they are always out of reach of empirical validation. In this sense the attribution of phenomenal consciousness is only ever theoretical and we are always at a loss when we are looking for certainty. 

In any case, taking a step back from all this talk of whether dogs and insects have consciousness, we might also ask what is the main difference between dogs and humans? We might say the ability to think, language, intelligence, and also inability to lick genitals, disdain for dog faeces for good measure too! Joking aside though, we might look at the kinds of criteria that we would use to make this comparison.

Dogs can communicate in simple ways, even if it is just scratching the door to be let out. Dogs can be taught to do tricks with repetition although I would draw a line quite quickly regarding intelligence as barking at passers by repeatedly does not do much for their case.

At this stage it is up to you whether you denote dogs as having some kind of rudimentary self or deny it completely. Its early days for you to make up your mind if you are just starting out in an investigation. Obviously it would be hard to say anything meaningful about the conscious experience of a dog, but what we can say is that we can witness quite a lot of processes going on that do not require a self.

In order to be a self of any kind, it appears requisite that some kind of self awareness is needed, such as monitoring of thoughts for example. But is it only thinking that presupposes a self?

The title of this article is 'Self requisite for causation?' and the point of this series was to highlight the internal contradictions of dualism and investigate our assumptions about causation. Now it seems we are in a murky realm postulating which beings have consciousness or not.

However, it is worthwhile in the sense that we have opened up some of the taken for granted assumptions regarding what self hood might consist of. 

We have highlighted the contradictions of how we identify with our emotions, whether we believe these are dualistic or not. We have also shown how dualism falls apart, when we try to stick to its model, in the face of howling contradictions. We have also seen how intelligence cannot be a criteria of other people having minds when we assume dualism is true. (Even monism has its issues regarding this [See Chalmers, 1996]). 

Evolution of the Self

Putting dualism aside for now, it should be clear at this point that if we are to postulate that there is some kind of self, we are going to have to account for its evolution in another capacity. Going down the evolutionary chain to single celled organisms such as amoeba, we are hard pressed to claim that some kind of self is going to be present. If we start scanning up the chain in terms of complexity of the brain and the like, we might want to insert it somewhere, but we might ask where?

We started to consider the possibility and we came up with a few candidates like awareness, consciousness, and intelligence. We could grant these things to dogs though, and this led us to start looking at the ability to communicate and think conceptually.

Communication exists to a degree in other animals but certainly not to the degree of complexity in which us humans do so everyday. There are examples of captive primates recognising symbols and the like if you do a web search on animal intelligence. Furthermore, other creatures show the ability for self awareness in the mirror test.

What we have to do is specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for self hood. The reason being is that we have to be able to state what the difference is between the amoeba and human having this virtue of self hood. If we cannot state what this difference consists in, then how can we be sure there is a difference? From our list of candidates we have:

Being phenomenally consciousness

Awareness of ones self and others

Possessing intelligence

Exhibiting intentionality

Ability to Communicate

By virtue of thinking abstractly

At this point I could walk you through each of these but it is probably better if you do the work to demonstrate it in your own experience. As a brief overview we know consciousness is a tricky one, but it seems absurd to suggest that your pet dog is not conscious in some capacity, and we can take that down to smaller animals like rats who have the ability to navigate mazes and solve very basic puzzles for food rewards. We have to remember the absurdity of displaying intelligence without a mind on the dualist account but here, we are postulating whether intelligence presupposes consciousness. 

Apes demonstrate awareness of the mindset of other apes around them before communicating, and I wrote an article about this research a few years ago. Other animals appear to communicate in more limited capacities. 
Apes are able to solve complex tasks as we illustrated with Kanzi the bonobo cooking marshmallows, and various other studies also demonstrate signs of inelligence. 

Thinking abstractly seems to be the strongest candidate here, but if we say this is the necessary condition, then we have to deny that anything that cannot think abstractly has no self.

This would be problematic in the case of a new born child if we were to try and say that there is some innate self in humans (viz. a dualist). Without the ability to think we would have to deny that they had any kind of self. If we were to admit this and say the self develops, then we would have to explicitly admit the self is constructed from experience and concepts - which is my argument.

However, if you want to reject this assertion you have to account for how a self exists independently from the very thinking that you believe is requisite for self hood. To compound this issue research has shown that it is possible that animals are capable of abstract thinking without having any kind of language, and that animals are capable of planning with episodic memory - just to muddy the water a little. 

Of course, these examples are extreme case formulations but the key is to notice that none of the candidates are sufficient to explain what has and does not have a self - in isolation and even in various combinations. We might argue that all of these are necessary conditions for self hood, but they are certainly insufficient to state what does have and does not have self hood. 

To demonstrate this to yourself you can pick away at the threads we have started here and see if you can unravel them to provide a suitable explanation for self hood on your own. I will save you the bother and tell you that these concepts are completely inadequate. 
What we do find is that we can give the vaguest definitions and then try and say that other facts are needed. We can also say that our current terms are derived from scientific study and therefore must be true. 

However, I cordially invite you to look in to scientific explanations of terms such as intelligence and consciousness. What you will find is that these are heuristic terms that mean a kind of phenomena we think we can intimately know but there is no objective grounding for them, nor any kind of satisfactory explanation for why they occur. Try defining 'intelligence' and you will see it is problematical. A starting point might be this.

Intelligence - capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc. 

Almost immediately, we open up a quagmire when we ask what does this presuppose? Many organisms can learn, where do we draw the line between those that can or can't? Define reasoning. Can we be sure that rats aren't reasoning when they navigate a maze, do they need to understand a problem and then solve it? How do we know there is mental activity ongoing in other animals, or for that matter other humans? - AKA the problem of other minds.

Of course, to follow all these threads would require tomes of reading but since we do not have a clear starting point, we are only capable of guess work. The point I am making is that we like to form a model of the world based on the foundations of these concepts. 
In practice though, the very terms upon which we are basing the model are merely sense making concepts that do not, in of themselves, give an explanation of the phenomena they supposedly represent when we try to apply them universally. In this instance they break down and we see that they are quite empty and lack universal application. 

In order for such an idea regarding the nature of creatures to have any traction, it must be universally applicable. If it lacks this universality we can question whether we are talking about some real phenomena, or an artifact of our way of making sense of the world. 
Were these ideas to possess the attribute of universality then they would be sufficient for us to make divisions according to our categories. 

The point here is that we are unable to do so.

This means our ideas about self hood, consciousness, and intelligence, to name a few, are inadequate for us to carve up the domain neatly and the boundaries are always going to be blurred. We are also left with the absurdity of accounting for a self that could not think at some point in our evolutionary past even if we could. 
The idea that self hood is innate is incompatible with evolution, and the prospect of accounting for 'selves' that did not think is difficult. 

We might ask for example when did self hood first appear? Unfortunately, we run in to the same problem providing any distinction that is not arbitrary. Moreover, we also have to admit that the self is the product of more complex brain functioning if we follow this chain of reasoning.

If the self is the product of the more complex functionality of the brain, the product of the mind as such, then we are left with the admission that the self is nothing more than the story the brain phenomenally experiences about its supposed place in the world.

In other words, it is a fantasy projection of thought. Although, I will grant this fantasy is coherent and exhibits a degree of predictability but on this view it cannot be anything more. 

Moreover, and most importantly, what grounds does this give us to make any assertions about agency and mental causation? 

If we are now a little sceptical about all our prior untested reasoning, which you should be, then how can we simply establish that a self is requisite for mental causation when we cannot even delineate what does and does not possess agency? 
If we cannot even make a division between ourselves and other simple species such as insects, then what grounds do we have for establishing facts about self hood being requisite for causation?

Of course, we have a couple of things not mentioned in the list above, for example, you may believe you have free will and volition over your actions and thinking. You might accept the idea that the ownership of emotions story may be beyond our control but you may be able to establish this argument in some other way.

If this is the case check out my thought experiments on the home page and you will see that our idea of what the self is, turns out to be insufficient to demonstrate that it is requisite for causation. 
We will of course explore this further in future posts but for now we can now be at least satisfied that our presumptions are quite groundless and, ultimately you will discover they are in fact completely empty.

As I have always said, you don't exist in the sense that you have the quality of essential existence, or are some kind of self sufficient entity. The reality is there is no division between the world and the brain processes that form the 'self'. 
Everything is all bound in the interconnected fabric of reality and the distinction made between 'you' and the 'world' is simply a conceptual distinction, nothing more. I invite you to take a look....

Part 1 Here

Dualism: A Religious Doctrine

Having established the absurd nature of holding to the Cartesian picture, we need to draw a few more comparisons. Our next stage is to illustrate that we cannot hold on to a dualism of body and mind and reject theism at the same time. Religion and Cartesian dualism are bound as part of the same package and the two are inseparable.

This is a slight deviation from the scope of the article as we were concerned more with mental causation, however, this will set us up nicely for the final part next week.  

The analysis we have made so far between animal and human minds is tentative at best. Since we don't know what animal experience is like, we can't be certain animals are not zombie like. 

However, the same criteria we use to attribute minds to other beings, namely intelligence, means that there is a sceptical argument about 'other minds' that the Cartesian view cannot deal with - without bringing in god.

One example that may provide a counter example in favour of the Cartesian picture is that computers may carry out complex tasks and not have any kind of 'mind-like' intelligence. 

This means that watching behaviour that even resembles any kind of intentionality, does not necessarily presuppose a mind. By intentionality, we are simply talking about some kind of agent acting with purpose or intention.

This example seems to reconcile the Cartesian picture but we have merely shifted our intuitions, and the same problem remains: How do we assert that anything has a mind?

The Cartesian response here is that we are human beings created by God with incorporeal souls and for this reason we are more than just animals. The Cartesian has not provided an independent justification of this ontological viewpoint though.

The truth is, we were asked how we were to determine that others could have minds?

This chain of reasoning simply entails that the Cartesian is restating their ontological viewpoint without qualification of how we could ever know the nature of non-physical beings. 

For this reason, this view can only make sense to some one whose framework supposes a deity.

For those of sound faculties of mind, it should be clear that theists start out from the position that god exists. One of the next steps then, is to justify how it is possible to survive bodily death to go to heaven. 

Simply saying 'god made it this way' is not even an argument, but is tantamount to the foaming at the mouth madness that underpins monotheistic religions.

When faced with the absurdity of trying to explain how one can survive bodily death, they have to rely on their presupposition of god to explain it. The problem is, they were arguing for the Cartesian view as a result of starting from the presupposition of their being a god in the first place - hence we have a circular chain of reasoning.

To argue in favour of the Cartesian picture by using god as a justification is to straightforwardly beg the question. Despite this though, this is exactly the kind of pattern that theists use to defend their delusion.

Evolution

The inadequacies of dualism are further highlighted by modern evolutionary theory. Evolution is the theory that life on earth evolved from a common ancestor and relies on genetic changes, within a population, over time. This change is driven by successive recombinations of genetic material, which is inherited by subsequent generations.

This process is subject to genetic drift, mutation and natural selection influencing the gene pool within a population. Evolutionary theory makes empirical observations and also provides us an excellent understanding of how there came to be so much complexity in the natural world.

We can plausibly see how 'speciations' appeared in nature and that beneficial mutations can occur in genes, which provide a survival advantage over other members in the gene pool. These advantages mean an organism stands more chance of surviving and replicating and this results in an increased frequency of the trait within a gene pool.

This accounts for the complexity and functionality of biological life and plausibly shows a realistic alternative to metaphysical and superstitious explanations.

Whilst we see folk like Ken Ham and his deluded 'young earth creationism' nonsense, many reasonable theists have had to accept some facets of evolution. When we see viruses mutate and bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, we have demonstrable proof of micro-evolution.

One of the main arguments theists bring against evolution centres around macro-evolution and speciation. That is to question whether or not the small-scale micro-changes over time were sufficient for new species to appear and diverge in separate developmental paths. 

It also questions whether or not new abilities could appear for example flagella appearing on bacteria, and this is referred to as 'irreducible complexity'. In this sense theists are trying to resort to what is termed 'God of the gaps' thinking, where every conceptual gap is exploited as proof that evolutionary theory is false and only God's existence could account for it.

There is much literature on the Internet about this and we could talk about it all day but before we get sidetracked, we will draw a line and try and plug our theories about self hood into this matrix. Naturally, dualism completely fails at this point if we believe that evolutionary theory is true. This is for the reason that we have no plausible explanation for how a non-physical thinking could evolve.

In order for dualism to be true, it is necessary that the soul/thinking stuff is some kind of self sufficient entity. If it is self sufficient it must, by necessity, subsist entirely separately from physical matter.

Remember, the thinking component can subsist separately from the physical body in heaven according to dualism.

Therefore, it follows that if there is any relation between the two then we need a theory to account for this. Since we already have trouble accounting for how physical and non-physical matter interact with each other at a causal level, then we are going to have real trouble trying to explain more complex interactions.

The ability to think in concepts and language is related to Wernickes and Broca's area in the brain, and these regions are more developed in humans than in apes. In order to account for this in a dualistic framework, we might want to theorise that as the brain 'hardware' improved so did cognitive ability.

At this point then we are obliged to provide a theory of how souls evolve and, once again, we are in the realms of foaming at the mouth crack pottery. It should be crystal clear now that in order for us to believe in dualism, we must also reject evolutionary theory.

Dualism is only compatible with creationism as modern evolutionary theory asks too many embarrassing questions that the doctrine is in no position to answer. You might want to rebuke my assertion here, but all I will say is that if dualism had any substance (lol!) then it would dovetail with modern theory.

As such, dualists have to reject modern theory in order to maintain their convictions. It may be tempting at this point to side with the god of the gaps thinking and say there is micro-evolution but something else played a hand in macro-evolution. However, you are basically saying you believe in god or some other supernatural force. If you are denying evolution is real then pay Ken Ham a visit, you will be in good company there.

Hence, there is no way you can accept dualism of body and mind but reject god simultaneously. The two go hand in hand together and it is very surprising how many people who consider themselves as secular, still subscribe to dualism as a result of its prevalence in mainstream society. This is because these people have never investigated the taken for granted assumptions and presuppositions upon which their model of reality is based - and we are talking about the majority of ordinary folk.

There is a synthesis of substance dualism that is non-religious, however, it brings in its own set of problems, not to mention many of these we have covered in this series. The main problem is centred around the fact that the theory of dualism was required to explain a religious ontology. Without this need then the conceptual difficulties it faces alone are sufficient reason for us to disregard it. Dualism is such an accepted ontological viewpoint in society, but when we question it we find that it is full of holes.

The next step is to start to look at what the theory of evolution means for our theories of self hood. Essentially, we have to take what we have learned so far and try to make some sense out of our traditional ideas of self hood within the context of evolutionary theory. What we will see is that, like the notion of dualism, our ideas evaporate under scrutiny and our conceptual presuppositions about the self were quite empty.  

Part VI here

In order to maintain our view of the Cartesian picture we tried to account for how the self is involved in the emotional process. What we discovered was we had difficulty attributing mental or physical causation. This is troubling because physical causation bypasses this Cartesian self completely, and mental causation gave that absurd picture of cause and effect. 

Since part of our identity revolves around our emotions we now find we have a hard time accounting for how a self could possibly interact with them. We have simply exposed how it is difficult to maintain these dualistic assumptions when we think about it logically. We will now further investigate our assumptions about self hood, by looking at the consequences of holding on to the idea that the Cartesian picture reflects reality in some way. 

Cartesian Animals

In terms of our Cartesian assumptions about the self, logically we have to deny that animals have any kind of self. This might seem quite contentious as we may or may not believe chimps have a rudimentary mind – whichever camp we may be in. However, trying to hang on to the Cartesian view leads us to another contradiction in the way we attribute the property of self hood to living things. 

Credit: Rob the doodler
http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2011/283/6/d/zombie_kitten_loves_brains_by_robthedoodler-d4cdtvi.jpg

In the first instance, Cartesian dualism is a religious theory. If you look back to part I, we were indoctrinated in to a dualistic view of the world at school. We were told by religious do gooders that there is an afterlife, and in popular culture it is taken as a given that the mind (the thinking thing) and the body are two numerically distinct entities. 
Even if we have atheistic tendencies, we might even believe we are some kind of transcendental mind that survives bodily death, even if we do not subscribe to beliefs in a deity.

Cartesian dualism was supposed to reconcile how we are able to survive bodily death in an afterlife. Whilst Descartes can surely be praised for some of his achievements, it was clear that he was unwilling to let go of his belief in god. We need only look at the preface of his famous meditations to see that he was strongly motivated by his religious beliefs, as well as his curiosity. 

It should be clear that in the Cartesian picture, after removing the body there is still a thinking thing which can go to heaven, hell, or whatever. With this in mind (no pun intended), we would be hard pushed to try and suggest that  animals also go to heaven because they have a thinking component. 
In fact, this is expressly forbidden in Cartesian dualism since Descartes regarded animals as automatons. That is to say, he argued cats and dogs are purely physical and lack the subjective experience that we have. 

The upshot of this view is that your dog does not experience pain when you accidentally tread on its paw. Nor does it feel the joy as it excitedly bounds its way to the hallway when it hears the rattle of its chain ready for walkies.

This seems to contradict our experience of animals, especially if you have ever owned a pet. This makes Cartesian dualism deeply counter intuitive from the outset here, but this alone is not sufficient to refute it. We must explore the consequences of this view and see what we else we come up with.

Mind = Soul = Subject

 On Descartes' Cartesian view then, the thinking thing was an incorporeal mind and he used this term interchangeably with the soul. This mind could experience emotions and think etc. Conversely, an animal could not think or experience emotion and consequently did not have a mind or soul. The reason for this was mentioned briefly earlier but is worth expounding in full as it is quite absurd. 

Since Descartes' theory was to garner religious credence, he would have a particularly hard time in those days, trying to convince people that cats and dogs had souls. Since he equated the mind with the soul he had to reject the idea that animals could have minds. 
Otherwise, he would have a hard time trying to theorise how snails and rats could be judged by god as being good or bad (I'm sure you can think up your own errant absurdities). By virtue of this logical absurdity, he had to commit to the idea that animals could only be automatons.

If we deny animals have minds though, we run in to the problem of accounting for how animals are able to solve puzzles or do complex tasks. We need only consider Kanzi the Bonobo cooking marshmallows on a fire he made. Kanzi learned how to do this from copying his handlers and the fascinating story is here.

It would be unrealistic to deny that some kind of rudimentary mind is necessary to undertake this task. Primates have mirror neurons like humans, and in order to complete a sequential task, there must be some kind of faculty to remember the order in which each sub-task is to be completed. For instance, one would have to collect dry wood first before starting the fire. 

To build a fire and cook a marshmallow, we would need to have the faculties to remember the sequence in order to achieve the result - Don't forget, a complex task such as this would be pushing the limits of Kanzi's intellect. Yet, according to the Cartesian view we would have to shrug our shoulders and say that the bonobo has no mind. Now we are left with the complete absurdity of explaining how Kanzi do complex tasks such as this, if Kanzi has no mind.

We could try and rescue a dualism claim by simply holding on to the notion that Kanzi is a automaton and has no phenomenal experience. 



This would entail that Kanzi is zombie like and then we do not have to explain away how animals might have some kind of mind/soul. We might even look at the phenomenology of how we made a camp fire in the past. Did we have to think out each step in a linear sequence or did we just do it in order without having to think too much about it?

This might suggest that Kanzi could do the task without having propositional content, or phenomenal concepts like 'wood' and 'fire' as such. However, it would be counter intuitive to say we didn't have a mind, simply because we were not intimately conscious of a schematic, or detailed plan of how to achieve toasted marshmallows. In virtue of our exhibiting behavioural intentionality, this suggests some kind of intelligence which we attribute to a mind, even if this 'mind' be basic or rudimentary. 

Even if we are unwilling to let go of this line of reasoning here, this stead fast conviction faces an even more devastating objection. 

If we were to ask how do you know your parents have a mind? You will find that you infer they do from their displays of intelligent behaviour. However, we have just denied that displays of intelligent behaviour are a sufficient condition to have a mind, when we deny Kanzi has a mind. That is to say, the intelligent behaviour we used to reason other people have minds formed the basis of this inference. 

If we deny that intelligent behaviour presupposes a mind, then how can we be sure that other human beings have minds? The assertion of whether humans or brutes are imbued with minds stands or falls on exactly the same ground.

This brings us right to the problem of 'other minds' which we will look into it in more detail another time. Just to outline it briefly, a Cartesian view means we have difficulty in asserting that the are other minds, besides our own. How can we be sure that everyone around us is not really a zombie, when we are trying to argue that we are some kind of special incorporeal non-physical mind inhabiting this body? 

Are there only zombies out there?

 We could only ever infer that there are other humans out there with a special class of thinking substance which we can only postulate exists. 




Hence we can never be certain that other people have phenomenal experience, or 'minds' on the Cartesian view* 

(* Footnote: a true sceptic would already reason this problem is also insoluble for anyone who subscribes to idealism. Scientific naturalism overcomes this difficulty by claiming the mind is numerically identical with the brain – i.e. we all have brains and so do many animals).

To bring this to a close, we now need to bring together the threads we have pulled and return to our non-conscious actions category once again. 

Part V Here...

Part 1 Here

Cause For Concern?

When we start to bring in theories related to mental causation of non-conscious processes we have uncovered some stark contradictions in our thinking, and also these questions have arisen so far in our investigation:

How is it that we and others think emotions and reactions are attributes of ourselves, or our identity, when it seems this is not a faculty a self could even control?

Can we say that emotions are mentally caused? - If so, we would have to hold the view that there are both conscious and unconscious mental processes, which are necessarily non-physical according to dualism.

If we do claim emotions and other non-conscious processes are either mentally caused, or physically caused, can we account for these positions from within our Cartesian framework? That is to say simply, can we make non-conscious processes intelligible in terms of our Cartesian picture?

We might still be able to explain these questions away but the point at this stage is that we simply always assumed this Cartesian picture was true. However, under scrutiny it seems that we are running in to difficulty maintaining our assumptions, and this is the only certainty we have found so far in our endeavours.

These non-conscious processes defy easy categorisation into either physical bodily processes, or mental processes. On the one hand we want to say that the self plays a causal role and emotions are mentally caused, but we are very inconsistent in the way we apply this to ourselves as we have illustrated.

We might be tempted at this stage to allow that non-conscious actions can be mentally caused.

For instance, Sigmund Freud postulated a subconscious and unconscious mind. In this way we could allow non-conscious actions to be consistent with mental causation, and thus we can deny there is a problem. In doing this we can allow a self, whatever that may be, to be able to mentally cause emotions below the level of our conscious awareness.

However, this has ramifications for the way in which we conceptualise a self, and forces us in to a number of counter intuitive views.

Dual causes

If we claim that emotions and non-conscious actions are mentally caused then, being consistent with our model of dualism, we are committed to the view that these mental states are also non-physical. That is to say, all mental causes are necessarily non-physical in our Cartesian picture.

Furthermore, we can contrast these mental causes with the appearance of conscious mental causation, e.g. thinking about raising our arm. In this sense, there are two types of mental causation, namely mental causation that is within our conscious awareness, and mental causation that is of the non-conscious type (sufficient for emotions etc.)

In subscribing to the Cartesian picture, we are also committed to the view that any subjective aspect of experience is mental. The experience of thought, emotions, pain etc. are purely mental and subjective aspects of experience. They may have physical correlates but ultimately, if we subscribe to the Cartesian picture we are also committed to this view.

So, if we postulate an unconscious mind which is responsible for all the bodily processes below our level of consciousness, then we would also assert that emotional triggers are controlled by a non-physical process of mental causation that ultimately becomes the conscious experience of emotion.

This then leads us to 2 different problems. The first of these is related to the causal mechanism of the brain. If we consider that emotions are caused by a non-physical state, this then would have to trigger a physical state in the body. Emotions have physical effects such as racing heart, change in posture etc. However, the upshot of this view is that in order for us to feel any sensation, which don't forget is mental, then there has to be a conversion process back to the non-physical.

So not only do we have to have an unconscious non-physical mental state causing a physical state, we also have to have, in turn, another non-physical state i.e. the experience of emotion, which has to be converted back from this physical event as a mental effect.

Rather than just the simple cause-and-effect picture we had in our minds, we now have to have a cause and effect and then another cause and effect in the chain in order for us to feel the sensation.

This means we have to bring in another auxiliary theory to account for this, namely a theory of interactionism that explains how physical states cause non-physical states. This means that in order for dualism to work we have to postulate two auxiliary theories to account for the interaction between the non-physical > physical and vice versa.

Worryingly, and more difficult on this view though, is that we are obliged to account for how something unconscious and non-physical, triggers something physical, which then becomes non-physical again, and then, crucially at this point, becomes conscious.

Why wasn't it conscious in the first place, and what is the cause of non-physical states becoming conscious?

These howling absurdities makes this view seem a very bizarre way of formulating a cause-and-effect relationship. The notion seems almost occult as we are literally inventing 'magical forces' which are beyond the sphere of possible human experience. This is not enough to prove its falsity, as a robust theory might appear in the future. However, it is certainly enough to raise our suspicions and even if such a theory could be formulated coherently, it would always remain beyond the realms of any kind of proof and would be considered crack pottery.

A more complex objection arises when we consider the purpose of emotions. The emotional response of fear is characterised as a rapid physiological response to the environment, which can bypass the conscious mind. 

If we had to think about reacting in these instances, it would be already too late as the decision takes time. In evolutionary terms we evolved to be able to avoid being the sabre-tooth tigers meal.

Part of this mechanism entails that we are 'saved from our rationality'.

To illustrate, imagine if we had to assess whether something was a threat before we ran away. In evolutionary terms we would stand far more chance of survival if we bypassed our rational ability to ponder whether the sabre tooth tiger has seen us or not, and make a sharp exit. If this was not the case it would mean that we would not be much good at survival.

Given this evolutionary view, if we opted to explain this in terms of mental causation, we would have to attribute this to a non-conscious and, in line with our dualist assumptions, a non-physical cause. 

However, such a theory of these causal states would have to account for how non-conscious, non-physical mental states, are triggered by our perceptual mechanisms to interact with the emotional system.

Surely it is the perceptual mechanism that triggers the physical emotional responses, and then this in turn causes the experience of emotion in the moment? However, if this was true then how can we argue that there is mental causation of emotions? 

Again we are at a loss here to even try and begin how to describe a chain of cause and effect. Any chain will be convoluted and we have to appeal to a complex array of different causes and effects!

The problem simply stated, is how do we distinguish between mental and physical causation in any chain of cause and effect? We can try and do this but our Cartesian picture starts to look quite absurd and over complicated. Whilst Occam's razor could hack this to pieces, for all we know this is really going on. 

The point though, is that we are uncertain if this is the case.

What we need to do now is bring in some other elements into the mix to investigate the coherence of this further. It may seem these objections are not insurmountable but when we start to investigate the consequences further, then the Cartesian picture simply falls apart, as it becomes increasingly counter intuitive to maintain in light of our other assumptions about the world.

Part IV Here

Part 1 Here

Mental causation?

In our Cartesian picture we referred to the fact that this self, whatever that may be ultimately, is the cause of various forms of cognition and action. The first thing we need to do then is delineate exactly what it is that this self would or would not be responsible for, in order for us to investigate it.

The way we could think about this is by dividing up the domain into the various functions that we think we can and cannot control.

 I'm sure you could fill out this list in its entirety since we have many bodily functions we can't control like digestion and there are many more physical activities we can do. In any case, we will start with non-conscious actions and investigate these. 

You may not think I am justified in separating these categorisations in this way, but thats fine as you can simply substitute your own. The point here is that I had this ontological view point when I started out. Many people start out with these shared assumptions and this ontology (a theoretical framework in laymans terms) is representative of our common sense cultural understanding.  

So, how do we characterise non-conscious actions then? 

Do they just happen of their own accord, or do they require any conscious thought?

Looking at our direct experience we can try and take conscious control of certain actions. Can you, for example, influence and regulate the rate at which you synthesise ATP from Glycogen, metabolise proteins, produce insulin etc? 
As you can see when you look, these kinds of processes happen of their own accord and cannot be manipulated simply by willing them. 
This would also be adequately demonstrated during our sleep, since it is not requisite that we are conscious of these processes. 

It may seem a little trivial to do this but we have utilised looking at direct experience to see if we can manipulate these processes and we have discovered that the following proposition is necessarily true: That there are certain aspects of physiology that we cannot consciously control. 
We have also logically worked on this because we have found the conditions under which our logic holds. Were it requisite that we consciously had to will these states we would have no explanation for why these processes occur during our sleep or in the event we were comatose for example. 

If we could refute this line of reasoning just once we could discard it, however, we have discovered that consciously willing is neither necessary nor sufficient for this type of causation. 

Part of doing things in this way is that we don't rest on this as universal truth and we acknowledge that this reasoning is based on other suppositions such as there being a real physical brain that regulates our metabolism, and some 'thing' that is conscious to try and look to see if it can manipulate these brain states. 
We also have to leave open the possibility that we may find sufficient cause through simply willing the action to occur at some point. This is because it's impossible to prove a negative. 

In light of the lack of evidence in empirical reality, we have to concede there is no evidence to suggest that willing is a sufficient cause for non-conscious actions. I am sure there are very few, if any, that would argue against this conclusion but we must leave open the possibility nevertheless. 

Having looked at non-conscious actions we can see that there are a couple of other things to look at in that list. There is one I've highlighted in particular and that is what we will be exploring next.

Interactionism With Emotion

Our task now then, will be to think about how a Cartesian self would interact with the body in this picture. On the non-conscious side we might decide that there is a way we could influence our emotions. We would certainly agree that emotions are a somatic response we are conscious of when we are experiencing them, however, we can certainly question the degree of control we have over them and how they are triggered. 

For example, we could easily imagine a confrontation that we expect to happen when we enter a room. 

We could be stood outside the door worrying to the point where our hands get clammy, our heart rate increases, and we start trembling before we enter. In this sense we might suggest that this could be mentally caused by imagining a future situation. It does seem to follow that our thoughts caused this situation at first glance.

Next, we will imagine that we have calmed down an hour or so later, and we might look at the thoughts that would occur to us. It would be here that we might claim we were nervous at that particular time, and we might even beat ourselves up about it, or blame ourselves for getting nervous. 

We might kick ourselves for not getting our point across because we were so panicky. We would then think of this emotion as a faculty of ourselves that we wish we had control over. 

However, this is very odd. 

In one sense we might blame ourselves for being nervous but on the other hand there is no way in which we could possibly be responsible for it. 
If there was any choice in the matter we would of course simply choose not to be nervous - right? 

How do we deal with this contradiction then?

What we tend to do is attribute it to an unconscious mechanism of ourselves. On one hand we blame ourselves, yet we actually put it down to an unconscious mechanism that we have no control over. 
So despite the fact that we attribute this reaction to ourselves, the fact of the matter is that we really don't have any choice in the matter and hence the appearance of us causing this emotional response is just an illusion. 

It might be argued at this point, that right now, we can remember a time we had a fight for example. 




Upon recalling this memory we can notice that we have a somatic response to the mental imagery. In this sense we can account for the mental causation of emotions. This does depend on the status that we give to this feeling though. 

If we accept that an emotional response of fear entails an increase in heart rate, sweaty palms, and butterflies in the stomach then we are only experiencing a somatic pattern associated with the memory, and not an emotion as such. We can allow this pattern is caused by our cognition for now, but you will have to come back and investigate this later when we look at controlling our thoughts.

Moving on, we can also say the same about having a funny reaction or reflex to a situation that may be embarrassing - we might be surprised and pull a funny face. 
This again, is something that we might attribute to ourselves, or certainly others will, even if this is something beyond our control.
This is particularly interesting here. On the one hand we have no control over these bodily processes yet on the other, we act as if we and other people do. We can get embarrassed about these things or perhaps even laugh about it when others commit a faux pas. 

We relate these things to identity and they seem to form a measure of our, or someone else's, self worth in a given situation. Surely though, this is exactly the wrong kind of thing to constitute self worth? A process to which we have no control over?

There is no sense in which ourselves or others can actually have any control over these processes but for now we can leave open the possibility that we might be able to influence them somehow. We have the appearance of being able to stop ourselves from blinking, hold our breath to stop breathing, and hold our nerve, metaphorically speaking, to counteract our fear. 

At best, all we can muster is that we might be able to influence them through muscular control or cognition. These processes, as it were, are simply happenings that proceed anyway despite any seeming efforts that we make. 

Where we have no control over certain functions but we act like we do, along with the rest of society, this does point to the fact that the self is a mere linguistic construction. 

This whole lot of I, me, and you did 'X' is simply an action we attributed to ourselves and others - a story about the self that is not there when we look. 

We attributed these emotions and some of these reflexive actions to the self but the reality is they happen of their own accord upon investigation. Whilst we have not broken all the tenterhooks yet we are starting to rattle the foundations on which it is based, and as we go through all the points what we find eventually is that the self is inherently empty.   

Don't take my word for it though let's keep digging.

Part III Here