Agency Quote

Agency, Awareness of

One of the things [Wilder Penfield] noticed in his experimental work was that his patients reported being consciously aware of the distinction between being agents and doing things, and being patients and having things done to them. Phenomena such as this led him to endorse dualism....One can surmise, then, that had Penfield been presented with the argument from causal closure, he would have found it wanting. And for good reason. In seeking to understand how events of different physical entities affect the capacities of micro-entities such as neurons, a neuroscientist such as Penfield is seeking to learn about properties of physical entities that are essentially conditional or min nature. A property that is conditional in nature is one specified in terms such as "If such and such is done to object 0 (e.g., a cause C is exerted on 0), then so-and-so will occur to 0 (e.g., 0 will move at rate R)." As the Nobel physicist Richard Feynman says, scientific questions are "questions that you can put this way: `if I do this, what will happen?'... And so the question `If I do it what will happen?' is a typically scientific question" (Feynman 1998, 16, 45). Chalmers's description of basic particles that are studied by physicists nicely captures their iffy nature: "Basic particles ... are largely characterized in terms of their propensity to interact with other particles. Their mass and charge is specified, to be sure, but all that a specification of mass ultimately comes to is a propensity to be accelerated in certain ways [moved at certain rates] by forces, and so on.... Reference to the proton is fixed as the thing that causes interactions of a certain kind that combines in certain ways with other entities, and so on" (Chalmers 1996, 153).

What Chalmers describes as a propensity of a particle to be accelerated is a capacity of it such that if it is actualized by an exercised power of another entity (whether physical or nonphysical in nature), the particle will be necessitated to accelerate. There is nothing, however, in the nature of the propensity or capacity of that particle that requires that it be actualized only by purposeless causal events of physical entities so that the physical world is closed to causal influence of mental events of souls choosing and intending to act for reasons. Hence, the actualization of a microparticle's capacity by a mental event on an occasion when a person chooses to act for a reason is not excluded by anything that is discovered in a scientific study of that capacity. And it is precisely on occasions like those involving the movements of our fingers and arms while typing that a neuroscientist will reasonably believe that the microphysical neural impulses that led to those finger movements must ultimately have originated with the mental causal activity of a soul that was choosing to act for a purpose. If a neuroscientist makes the presupposition that microphysical entities can have their capacities actualized only by other physical entities and never by choices made by souls for purposes, then he does so as a strict naturalist and not as a scientist.

Stewart Goetz;Charles Taliaferro. Naturalism (Kindle Locations 471-494). Kindle Edition.