Abstract
Argument: Agent causation differs from event causation in the feeling of spontaneity and the delay and demarcation between cause and effect. Agent autonomy may depend on a (virtual) duration that spans developing actions. The feeling of spontaneity is related to the precedence of the self, the depth (past) to surface (present) transition, and potentiality prior to actuality. Delay and demarcation reflect state decay and/or revival between intentions and actions. An intentional state is replaced over an intervening series with a final depletion of conceptual content in motility. Agent causation corresponds with persistence in event causation, in that a subject undergoing minimal conceptual shift is construed as causal across the boundaries of an interval.
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Notes
A good discussion of arguments for and against autonomy can be found in P. Van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
For example, see Susan Wolf, Freedom Within Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
R. Kane, Free Will and Values (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1985).
H. Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
See discussion in Brown, Self and Process, 127–146.
There is a similarity with Whitehead’s account of becoming. See A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929).
Self and Process, 189–191.
H. Price, “A Neglected Route to Realism about Quantum Mechanics,” Mind 103(1994): 303–336.
R.E. Hobart, “Free Will as Involving Determinism and Inconceivable Without It.” In B. Berofsky, ed., Free Will and Determinism (New York, Harper & Row, 1966).
Frankfurt, What We Care About.
D. Davidson, Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 53.
B. Russell, Human Knowledge (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1948).
See arguments in T. Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Russell’s distinction of knowledge by description or by acquaintance, discussed inter alia in G. Madell, The Identity of the Self (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981); and J. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
This problem is discussed in Life of the Mind, 22–23.
Life of the Mind, 173–251.
Self and Process, 127–146.
Self and Process, 45–46.
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© 1996 Plenum Press, New York
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(1996). Autonomy and Agent Causation. In: Time, Will, and Mental Process. Cognition and Language: A Series in Psycholinguistics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-34654-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-34654-0_6
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