[The Spinozist Mormon] The Relationship of Consciousness to Rationality, Responsibility, and Will

[Christian Y. Cardall]

As an immediate follow-up to my discussion of scenario formulation and selection, in addressing Blake’s emphases on ‘rational thought’ and ‘moral responsibility,’ I think it may be useful to recognize, and perhaps put in proper place, the role of consciousness. Humans, apparently uniquely, have a cognitive capacity for recursion that seems important for both language and consciousness. If I understand correctly, lesser apes have some capacity for symbolic communication, but not the ability to talk about what Alice is talking about Bob talking about (this sort of multi-leveled ‘nesting’ is what I mean by ‘recursion’). Similarly, it may be that apes ‘think’ in some immediate sense, while not having the recursive ability to think about their thinking—the phenomenon we call consciousness.

Now, Blake has emphasized the term ‘rational thought.’ I am not sure I understand the motivation behind the emphasis, and think behind it is undue placement of weight on consciousness. Consider again the elaboration and assessment of, and selection among, future scenarios by an expert chess computer program. Would Blake call it rational or irrational? I would prefer to call it ‘rational’ (centuries of philosophical tradition be damned if necessary!). For me, I suspect in contrast to Blake, rationality is a matter of accuracy, reliability, logical rigor, and so on, rather than a conscious feeling of control (see below on mental illness). In terms of freedom, more distinguishing between chess programs and humans than rationality (which I would say they share) or consciousness (which humans have and chess programs lack) is the auto-rewritability of humans’ rules and values (see the immediately preceding post).

On to ‘moral responsibility,’ which I would say involves the initiation of, regulation of the nature of, and termination of social relationships (note this description encompasses even judgment by God and assignment to kingdoms of glory). If I declare expectations to someone, spelling out what will happen to our relationship based on various behaviors she might exhibit, and she can therefore (like an expert chess program) accurately formulate and assess future scenarios, then she is ‘responsible’—she can respond to these expectations according to her values. (Similarly but more primitively, in an airplane on autopilot we may say that the onboard computer is ‘responsible’ for the maneuvering of the plane.) Along with this, I ‘hold her responsible’ by regulating my participation in the relationship in accordance with the expectations I laid down. Now if someone is mentally ill, they are incapable of accurate scenario formulation and/or assessment, and therefore cannot respond accurately—they are not ‘responsible.’ Likewise, recognizing this incapacity, I may not ‘hold them responsible’—lay down expectations or regulate the relationship in the same manner as with some someone sane.

Now, there are degrees of responsibility, and we may choose to distinguish the higher degrees that require consciousness by the name moral responsibility. In the documentary March of the Penguins, the colony does not allow a mother penguin who has lost her egg or offspring to steal that of another. The enforcement of the relationship would be the same whether or not the mother penguin’s behavior results from faulty brain wiring (‘mental illness’). This is because penguins, not having the recursive capacity of consciousness, cannot think about other penguins’ thinking, or assess their assessments. In contrast, the regulation of human (and presumably divine) relationships proceeds in part on the basis of thinking about and assessing the thinking and assessments of others—a recursive activity requiring consciousness. None of these features of responsibility, however—whether amoral and unconscious, or moral and conscious—seem to require the absence of determinism.

Finally, on the relationship of consciousness to ‘free will.’ Blake tries to evade causal determinism, while disclaiming “mere indeterminism,” by saying that “What accounts for why an agent chooses A rather than B is that the agent has a power to agent cause the decision that is inherent [in] the very fact of having a will that is free.” But it seems to me that this statement is meaningless without an operationally useful notion of a ‘will.’ I think it would be useful and meaningful to use the term ‘will’ to describe a situation in which the assessment of future scenarios is itself being self-assessed—in colloquial terms, that a conscious mind is ‘observing’ its own deliberations. While we do not presently understand how consciousness arises, I do not know of anything precluding the possibility that this entire process of our brain or eternal intelligence monitoring its own assessments proceeds entirely under causal determinism.



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Posted by Christian Y. Cardall to The Spinozist Mormon at 12/23/2005 05:44:00 PM