The distinction made here is that between emotions as body states and feelings as neural representations of that body state, which may or may not become conscious. There are some universally recognized emotions, namely happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust (Damasio, 1999, p. 50). Several of these emotions have their own distinct physical patterns in the body, meaning that a scientist with the right apparatus can to some degree know what you feel without your telling her (Damasio, 1999, p. 61). Again, there are many aspects of emotions and feelings which support the idea that they have evolved as survival-enhancing mechanisms rather than something ontologically unique in another dimension of mind. The basic emotions have distinct physical patterns, and areas of the brain can be stimulated electrically to make people feel extreme anger or fear.¹⁰⁶ The fact that the intensity of an emotion can be determined with electricity supports the understanding of it as a causal process. The fact that we have the basic emotions we do, with their clear survival value, also suggests their origin in evolution. Even the fact that feelings show in the face can be explained with evolutionary reasons (Pinker, 1997, pp. 414– 415).

A survey of feelings becomes much more complex as feelings combine with different thoughts, as then we can speak of many different feelings, although what is happening in the body may be very similar.¹⁰⁷ Damasio himself distinguishes between universal emotions, social emotions, background emotions, moods, drives and motivational states. These distinctions are not so important here, although we shall return to drives and motivations when we look at desire (Damasio, 2010, pp. 22–26). Pain and pleasure are important for our topic, however, so where do they fit into this picture? Many feelings have incentive and disincentive functions. Some are negative and can be experienced as punishment; they are meant to make the organism withdraw from something negative. Others

Electrical stimulation of the hypothalamus can cause extreme rage, and electrical stimulation of the amygdala can cause both fear and rage (Joseph, 1996, pp. 173–174, 182–183).

Damasio speaks of secondary emotions, which are combinations of cognitive states and basic emotions, and these can evoke numerous feelings with subtle variations, like the differences between euphoria and ecstasy based on happiness, or melancholy or wistfulness based on sadness, or panic and shyness based on fear, and so on (Damasio, 1994, pp. 134, 149–150). Feelings like jealousy, envy, schadenfreude, etc., may feel quite similar. In an experiment, people were given a drug which puts the body in a certain state. When different groups were in the same room with an actor behaving a certain way, the people interpreted their own feelings in the same way as the actor behaved (Schachter and Singer, 1962).

are positive and can be experienced as rewards; these are meant to make the organism approach something positive. Pain is clearly negative, but it is almost as basic as an automatic response to a stimulus.¹⁰⁸ It has the function of making the organism withdraw from that which creates the pain. Pleasure is a common name for different good feelings, and motivates the organism for doing things that are good for survival and a good life but also for sexual reproduction (Damasio, 2010, pp. 52–53).

So far I have said that feelings arise when the organism senses something in the outside world or its own body, and I shall argue that this is often an important influence when people make choices. An emotional influence of the body which is important for understanding free will is the fact that we can remember earlier emotional experiences we have had. When we are about to make an important choice we can remember earlier relevant events which evoke feelings that influence the choice we are about to make. Feelings are stored in memory and influence choices, and this is another reason to take a closer look at memory.

### 5.5 Memory

The brain can reproduce events in our mind regardless of our choosing. Memories are stored together with the feelings that we reacted to the situation with, and more emotional memories are better remembered and more easily recalled. This is generally an advantage for humans, since it often makes us recall important earlier events when we are in similar situations and can take advantage of what we learned the last time. But it can be a disadvantage for particular individuals, for example, people with post-traumatic stress disorder who constantly recall horrible events. It is not the event alone that is stored in the memory, but our relation and reaction to the event and our feeling at the time (Damasio, 1999, pp. 130 –132).

The area which is hurt sends signals to the brain through special nerve cells called C-fibers and A-δ-fibers. The destroyed cells in the area release chemicals and these also send a signal to the brain. The input from these different fibers and nerve cells creates representations in the brain of the body being in pain in a certain area, and as these patterns become conscious we have a conscious experience of being in pain (Damasio, 1999, pp. 71–73). The same C-fibers also mediate itching, but they cannot be used for both itching and pain, so if you are itching in an area which is then hurt the itch will disappear and only the pain will be experienced (Gieler and Walter, 2008, pp. 54–56).

Several different functions of feelings have been mentioned, but feelings have another function as well, which has to do with memory and choice. Damasio has put forward a hypothesis known as the somatic marker hypothesis. The main point is that neural patterns representing events in the world are connected to feelings which give the different neural patterns different levels of importance. This explains what we become conscious of both in sensing and in remembering, for at any one time there are numerous neural patterns that could have become conscious: the ones that are more important because of their connected feeling are selected by the brain, which has a disposition for selecting the ones with the strongest feelings attached to them (Damasio, 2010, pp. 174–175).

Furthermore, the somatic marker hypothesis explains how people make efficient choices despite the so-called "frame problem", which means that in any situation there are numerous things that could be considered before one makes a choice; this would delay the choice for a long time. But when feelings are connected to the different images, the brain sorts them according to importance and generally makes the choice much easier. Damasio supports this hypothesis with findings from patients whose brain injuries left all knowledge and logical capabilities intact but whose feelings of emotions were lost. They then also lost their ability to make rational decisions (Damasio, 1999, pp. 40–42).¹⁰⁹

All of this is important for the understanding of deliberation and free will since, when we are deciding what to do in important situations, memories and feelings will often be activated (without us choosing that such should happen) and influence what we think and feel about the different alternatives for action, thereby influencing or changing our initial desires. Which alternatives pop into mind may seem undetermined, but may nevertheless be a regular causal process with no indeterminism in it. Much more will be said about this later.

There are different kinds of memories which must be stored somewhat differently since it is possible to lose all memories of one kind but not those of another. Short-term and long-term memory is a distinction most people know of. It is also usual to distinguish between procedural memory (remembering how to play the guitar or ride a bicycle) and fact memory (remembering facts or events). There are some who cannot consciously remember what a thing is or does, but are still able to use it correctly because of their procedural memory. A more interesting distinction for the topic of choices and free will is that between general facts and episodic memories. One patient, E. D., could remember many facts

For example, Damasio gave such a person a choice of two dates for their next meeting, and he wavered between the two dates for almost half an hour before Damasio stopped him and decided the date for him (Damasio, 1994, p. 193).

about Kilimanjaro without remembering having been on top of it (Markowitsch, 2004, p. 52). Damasio mentions a person who looked at pictures and correctly identified them as portraying a wedding, but he did not remember that it was his own wedding (Damasio, 2010, pp. 138–140). Most important for the question of free will are fact memories and memories of past events. The reason is that fact memories activate images of alternative actions that can be chosen, which again activate autobiographical memories and feelings connected to each alternative possibility for action (Damasio, 1994, p. 196).

The important thing to note from this presentation of memory is that we have stored facts and memories that can be activated as alternatives for action in the future, and we have stored memories with feelings connected to them which can be activated and influence what we desire most strongly to do. Our memories and our experiences can be the cause of our choices, and some of these memories constitute our autobiographical self, which means that our autobiographical self can sometimes be the cause of our choices. The self is the next topic to be considered.

### 5.6 The self

Damasio distinguishes between wakefulness, mind and self. The mind is neural patterns that can function non-consciously but which require a self to become conscious (Damasio, 2010, pp. 159–166). Damasio has an influential theory about the self. He thinks that the brain can cause a conscious experience by adding a self process to wakefulness and mind. But how did the self develop? I will spend some time on this since it helps us understand who the agent is who has free will. Damasio argues that the self was built in three different stages. I will present these stages in more detail after a quick overview first to make it easier to follow. The first stage is the proto-self, which is a neural pattern representing the whole organism. This proto-self produces a primordial feeling, which is the feeling of my own body existing, but without any further connection to the world. In addition to the proto-self, the brain creates neural patterns representing objects and events in the world, but it also creates neural patterns representing the relationship between the organism and the outside world. From moment to moment there is a series of neural patterns representing how the organism changes in relation to the outside world. This creates changes in the primordial feeling which are consciously felt as an experience of changes in the world. The representations of change create pulses of core consciousness that together constitute the core self, which is the second stage. The core self is this series of consciously experienced changes that arise because of the neural patterns representing changes in the body in relation to the world outside. Finally, these conscious experiences can be held together in extended consciousness to create the autobiographical self, which is a neural pattern representing the life story of a person, created by memories and continuously reconstructed.

In more detail: Damasio defines the proto-self as "an integrated collection of separate neural patterns that map, moment by moment, the most stable aspects of the organism's physical structure" (Damasio, 2010, p. 190). The protoself is constituted by three different kinds of neural patterns (which Damasio calls "maps"). The first kind represents the body – not the whole body, but the most stable parts of the body. Damasio argues that that is important, since it can explain the stability of the self process, and this is also the reason for the last part of the definition of the proto-self. It is this representation of the body which gives rise to the primordial feeling, which is the basis for all other feelings. The second kind of neural pattern which constitutes the proto-self is a general representation of how the main parts of the body relate to each other when the body is not moving, and it is then constantly compared with patterns representing how the body is moving right now. The third kind of neural pattern is representations of the sensory portals of the body (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin), and these have the function of locating where the body is relative to the sense impressions. Not only do we see and hear, but we also feel that we see with our eyes and hear with our ears. This creates an experience of having a certain perspective and particular location in the world (Damasio, 2010, pp. 190 –198).

Damasio does not think that the proto-self and primordial feeling are enough to account for the phenomenon of self which we humans experience today. Had it only been a proto-self its experience would have consisted only of a primordial feeling of being a self from moment to moment with no connection to anything. What is needed is a clear experience of being a protagonist connected to events in the world, and Damasio thinks that this happens in the following way: When the organism encounters something, this changes the organism and makes the brain construct a new pattern representing the change. The change in the proto-self leads to a change in the primordial feeling, and this change is experienced as a conscious experience of the object. But it is also experienced as something happening to a protagonist, to a self. The narrative of objects encountering a body and giving rise to different feelings in the body also suggests that there is a protagonist to whom things happen, who feels and acts and has a sense of ownership of the experiences. The self is, so to speak, deduced from the narrative and experienced as such a self (Damasio, 2010, pp. 201–204). Damasio has also described it by saying that our conscious mind is like a movie, and when we ask who is watching the film the answer is that the watcher is a part of the movie (Damasio, 2004, p. 11).

I find it useful to distinguish between a minimal self or basic subjectivity and the more complete sense of self which the core self is. By "basic subjectivity" I mean the phenomenon that something is like something for something or someone, and I shall argue that this is presumably what Damasio means by his "primordial feeling". Something cannot be like something unless it is like something for something or someone. What is expressed in this "for something or someone" is what I mean by basic subjectivity. Even if the core self can be deduced from changes in primordial feeling, it requires a basic subjective element in the primordial feelings in the first place. What I want to do here is to add some support for the idea that the core self can be deduced from changes in primordial feelings.

A sense of self, by which I mean a sense of being a single conscious subject, may not need to imply a physical or non-physical continuous self which has this sense of self. Pete Mandik has argued that a self can be deduced from experiences in the same way that we can see a picture and deduce that there must have been a camera at such and such an angle and distance from what is seen in the picture. The perspective and distance suggest where the camera must have been to take the picture, but the picture may have been computer-generated and given a certain perspective. Mandik's point is that there are a lot of subjectively conscious experiences going on in the brain which may createasense or thought that it must have been a self having these experiences, but in fact there is just a series of experiences including the experience that there is a self having the experiences. We understand temperature as hot or cold and we experience things as good or bad relative to ourselves. But there could be something in the nature of the experience that makes us assume a continuous self is having the experiences even if there is no such continuous self. Perhaps there is just a series of experiences, pulses of consciousness, which give the illusion of a self owning the experiences – and even the sense of a self as the agent of certain events even if they just happen as a causal chain of micro events (Mandik, 2001).

But must it not be someone who deduces that there is a self? No, the suggestion is that there are ontologically subjective experiences that can be configured in a unified way which then constitutes a self-experience. Ontological subjectivity is a feature of the world, as argued by John Searle (Searle, 2007, p. 327), which can create a self. This does not explain what basic subjectivity is, or how basic subjectivity is possible at all, but it is an explanation of how a full-blown self can arise from experiences that are subjective in a basic sense. Translated to the theoretical framework of this book, it means that the qualia field consists of values that have basic ontological subjectivity to them, which again means that a unified configuration of these can produce a conscious core-self-experience like the one humans have.

How are then all the different qualia produced by different parts of the brain combined into one coherent picture? What "glues" the parts together so that one subject can be the part of many pieces, sometimes referred to as the subject summing problem? Here I think similarly to Sam Coleman, who says that qualia are arranged by being located at different places on a phenomenal screen into a coherent whole. Being this coherent system is to be a conscious subject (Coleman, 2012, pp. 159–160). To this I would add that the phenomenal screen is a part of the qualia field with a unified set of actualized qualia values, and that the brain has evolved to create such unified parts. Above, we saw examples of how the brain merges contradictory input into a unified whole, and below I shall describe how and why this evolution took place. It is the unifying work of the brain that explains how the pieces combine to have a subject as their sum.

The third stage in the development of the self is the autobiographical self. The autobiographical self consists of our memories, including memories of our thoughts about the future and who we are. Whereas the core self is always present when a person is conscious, either in focus as self-awareness or in the background since attention is on something else, the autobiographical self is either dormant or active. It is important to understand that every time memories are recalled, they are modified a little, and the feelings they are connected with may change a little. This means that the autobiographical self is reconstructed all the time (Damasio, 2010, pp. 210 –211).¹¹⁰

The autobiographical self can be constructed only because the consciousness is able to hold several elements present over time. Different memories can become conscious to a person and grouped together or seen in the light of each other, thus giving a coherent picture of who that person is. I have already mentioned Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis. It says that every time an image is recalled, it is automatically marked with a certain value in the way that a certain feeling expresses this value it is connected with, and this valuation is constantly revised. The image of who we are – our autobiographical self – is

Interestingly, this explains how (parts of) psychoanalysis work(s): non-conscious memories from childhood might be activated in the mind or in dreams, but without becoming conscious to the awake person. If there are bad feelings connected with the memories, these may create more negative feelings or problems like anxiety or depression, while the memory itself is still non-conscious.When the memory is recollected in consciousness, new feelings are connected to it in the same way as all recalled memories. But now one may see the incident in a whole new light, or relate to it in a safe context, and connect new feelings with the memory, which might stop or reduce the negative influence on the person.

also marked by such a feeling and constantly revised. Damasio argues that this marking depends partly on preset dispositions acquired through evolution so that things which are important for survival are considered important. But the marking also depends on values acquired through life – things we have come to see as important for us in the light of our individual experiences and reflections (Damasio, 2010; Damasio, 1994, pp. 177–180). This is important for the topic of free will, because it means that things we have come to see as important through our experiences and thoughts are stored in our autobiographical self and influence the later choices we make.¹¹¹

It is useful at this point to sum up the terminology concerning the self that will be used in the rest of this book. The core self is the stream-like consciousness of what happens here and now together with a feeling of what that is like. It is a series of conscious events – the stream of consciousness consisting of experienced qualia. The core self is a process of conscious experiences, and the physical basis for the core self is patterns representing changes in the interaction between the proto-self and the environment. The autobiographical self is a person's understanding of herself based on memories and their connected feelings. The autobiographical self is a physical neural pattern which can become conscious. This image of oneself also influences how it feels to be that person in any moment of core self-consciousness.

Memories of what has happened – consciously or non-consciously – in the mind (sensing, thinking, feeling, desiring) constantly return to the mind and influence what happens in the mind the next time. A person has experiences and these lead to feelings and thoughts that are stored in the memory. The more memories of thoughts and feelings a person has connected to her experiences, the more these memories will influence what the person desires later, since desires also depend on what we feel about different alternatives (as I argue in the next section on desire). The autobiographical self is a collection of memories of thoughts and feelings which influences the desires and choices of every person. Our choices are not only influenced by the autobiographical self, since we are born with many dispositions and other non-chosen influences (e. g., a non-chosen acquired mental disorder) that can also come into play. But the autobiographical self becomes a larger and larger influence on most people's choices during

Let us say that future research in neuroscience rejects Damasio's distinction between the core self and the autobiographical self. There will nevertheless remain something structurally similar, where something corresponds to our conscious experience of here and now, while something corresponds to the important memories that shape how we experience ourselves as persons and what we desire. These parts of a better theory of the self in the future must then replace what I here call the core self and the autobiographical self.

their lives, since a larger and larger collection of thoughts and experiences can be remembered, and then habits and character traits are developed which influence future choices.

I use the terms "person" and "agent" interchangeably for a living human body with a mind and a core self. What happens in the core self is stored as memories and added to the autobiographical self, which in turn influences what happens in the core self. The term "autobiographical self" can be understood in several different ways. Every person has many experiences and these are stored as memories. A neural pattern is constructed in the brain representing the person who has had these experiences, and this is a coherent pattern of important memories. This pattern changes over time and can become conscious. This neural pattern is what I mean by "the autobiographical self", and although it can be seen as a process over time, I use it largely to mean the neural pattern as it is today or at the time of discussion.

The autobiographical self is not all my memories, but a selection, and although it can become conscious, not all details of this neural pattern can be conscious at the same time. For some people there are probably parts of their autobiographical self that never become conscious. This means that they may have a conscious understanding of themselves that does not match their autobiographical self as neural pattern at all points. For example, they may have experienced something disgraceful which they non-consciously deny ever happened as a survival technique. They may think that they handle certain situations well, but in these situations the non-conscious and denied memory may still be non-consciously activated so that they behave strangely in these situations – which they may also fail to realize.

I will end this subchapter by noting some meanings of the terms "self" and "sense of self" on which I do not focus in the rest of the book.Ihave already mentioned the primordial feeling based on the proto-self, which is the subjective experience of being present, whereas the core self is the experience of being an agent owning the experiences, and this experience is based on representations of changes happening to the proto-self. This experience explains why agents feel that they own their actions even if there is no homunculus inside our body but rather a series of causal processes happening in the mind. The sense of being someone who acts is based on the fact that actions follow intentions.¹¹²

The term "sense of self" can include many different experiences. There is the sense of presence, which is the primordial feeling. There is the sense of being one, which is based on our unified conscious experience. There is the sense of

Similar distinctions are made in Gallagher (2000).

being one with your body, which is based on the core self experience of being a protagonist to whom changes happen, and this is the same as the sense of ownership of your own experiences. The sense of where your body is and how it is positioned is based on a constant comparison between a master map of the body in repose and the position of the limbs relative to this.¹¹³ The sense of where you are located in the world is based on the perspective of your conscious images.

What about the sense of identity over time? Since a person can consciously remember what has happened to this body with this core self, the person will have a sense of persisting identity over time, and identify with that same body and its core self of several years ago. The memories are what give the sense of persistent identity, but what constitutes personal identity over time, metaphysically speaking? I can only deal very briefly with this here, but I think that at this level of detail, it is possible to describe quite accurately what happens in different difficult cases.

For example, we can ask: if each half of your body was united with another half or each particle in your body was removed and replaced one at a time while you are anesthetized, so that two identical replicas are created, or a teleportation going wrong suddenly caused two replicas, which of them is you? "You" is ambiguous, since it can refer to the person, the autobiographical self or the core self. What happens is that the physical structure of the body and the autobiographical self are made into two versions of the original. These two bodies and autobiographical selves now give rise to one core self each, which in their first waking moment have exactly the same memories, but from the next moment on have distinct experiences, thoughts and feelings and start to change their autobiographical selves into two different autobiographical selves.

One person will then have turned into two, just as it sometimes happens that an embryo splits into two and gives rise to twins. Jack in 2020 becomes Jack 1 and Jack 2 in 2021. Jack 1 and Jack 2 were Jack in 2020, but neither of them is Jack of 2020 anymore. Against this, one can then object that two different persons (Jack 1 and Jack 2 in 2021) cannot be identical to one (Jack in 2020). But that presupposes the classical understanding of identity where all properties are undistinguishable, and while this applies to synchronic identity, it is not given that identity over time or persistence should be defined the same way.

This sense can be disturbed, and scientists have managed to stimulate an area of the brain which allows them to create out-of-body experiences for the person so stimulated (Blanke, Ortigue, Landis, and Seeck, 2002). There are also many simple experiments that one can perform on oneself to disturb this sense; see for example Ramachandran and Hirstein (1999, pp. 105– 107).

Derek Parfit argues that what should matter to people when it comes to such cases is not identity in the sense of all properties being undistinguishable, but rather survival in the sense of psychological connectedness and/or continuity for any causal reason. What that means is that the mental states of a person must be causally related through overlapping series even though there may be gaps in the series (Parfit, 1984, pp. 205–207).

 Then you would and should clearly think that you had survived. If the doctors then came and said that the other half of the brain had also been saved, and now one more body was conscious with many of your memories intact, then you should not think that you have now died, but instead celebrate it as a double success (Parfit, 1984, p. 254). Asking which person is the original is like asking which party is the original if a political party splits up: It is an empty question – we know all there is to know, and there is nothing more to say or know which makes one of them the original (Parfit, 1984, pp. 260 –261).

I agree with Parfit's reasoning and think that persistence or personal identity over time is just that a person has a quite stable internal structure that only gradually changes over time, without there being an exact border for when something persists. This is the same kind of reasoning that I presented with identity over time for any object in Chapter 2. You can raise a version of the Theseus' ship paradox against this view, since Theseus' ship would remain the same ship if it was gradually rebuilt, but not if everything was suddenly replaced. Likewise, we say that a human being is the same when cells are gradually replaced, but we would not say so if all parts of human body were suddenly replaced except the feet.¹¹⁴ Somewhere between these extremes there is a diffuse border, and the coarse concept of personal identity over time is useful even if not exact.

When we use the concepts of autobiographical self and core self we can explain everything that happens in an imagined fission-case where Jack turns into Jack 1 and Jack 2 and there is nothing more to know and no reason to insist that one must be the original. Jack's wife may have a pragmatic reason to see it differently, but will have to find a pragmatic solution, like making a copy of herself as well, and the two new couples must share house, money and responsibility for their children.

This example and argument is from Rescher (2001, p. 86). I recommend this book by Rescher for an overview of how to think of some typical classical paradoxes.

Returning to the self, most important for the question of free will is the autobiographical self, the neural pattern which represents a person's life right now and is a product of earlier thoughts, feelings and actions influencing future choices. Whereas the core self is a series of conscious experiences, the protoself and the autobiographical self are physical neural patterns, and the person is the combination of a physical substrate including the physical mind, representations in the brain, and the conscious experience of the core self.

What about the concept of "the self"? (I will not use this term in isolation after this paragraph, but specify just which self I am referring to.) It is normal to think of the self/agent/person as a continuous entity which is the cause of actions. But the core self is not one entity with a continuous existence; rather it is a continuous series of experiences only interrupted by certain forms of sleep and anesthesia or coma. As I shall argue in the chapter on free will, actions are caused by desires triggering motor neurons, and these desires can be caused by the autobiographical self or other causes. It is the physical substrates which give the experience of continuity, the sense of identity with the body and memories, even if both the memories and the body change gradually. Much of what happens in our conscious mind depends on non-conscious physical activity in the brain and body. So those who wish to speak of the self as continuous or a cause of actions should include a physical aspect of the self. I find it better to leave out the concept of "the self" altogether in favor of more precise terms.

As regards these concepts – agent, person, core self, autobiographical self – what does the term "I" refer to? What do I identify with when referring to myself? When I want to be the cause of my choices, what is the cause that is I? I certainly identify with a body with a conscious mind which can act now. But I also identify with the same body with a conscious mind at earlier stages which made choices that shaped the autobiographical self I have today. When the term "I" is used in daily life, it can refer to several different things – a body, a core self, an autobiographical self – now and over time, but even if the term is ambiguous in daily speech, it should be precise here. When I, the author of this book, use the terms "I" or "my" about myself, it refers to a particular body with a mind, a core self, and an autobiographical self from its beginning and development until today. In other words, when people say "I", in my definition they refer to that which I define as a person, and the autobiographical self that persons usually develop over time.

There are so many philosophical problems that it is difficult to give a coherent definition of what a person is and what the conditions are for (personal) identity over time, but the most important question is what actually exists in the world, and that is bodies with minds and core selves which usually develop autobiographical selves over time. I suggest that the term "I" should be thought of as referring to this whole configuration of structures (a body with a mind and core self and usually an autobiographical self), but in daily speech it is often ambiguous what "I" refers to since it refers to different parts of this configuration. Thus, if I say that I am six feet tall, "I" refers to the body which is so tall, but if I say that I am thinking, "I" refers to the conscious brain activity that occurs in the same body. Or I can say that I was 30 years old ten years ago and refer to the body, the memories of which are stored in my autobiographical self now.

So far we have looked at how the memories, emotion and the self can influence what we desire when making choices, but time has now come to take a closer look at desire.

### 5.7 Desire

The concepts of desire and of desire strength are important for my causal understanding of the mind and free will. I will unpack this later, but start with untangling different distinctions when it comes to desire. Damasio does not have much to say about desires, but he does distinguish between emotions on the one hand and drives and motivations on the other, which he says are simpler constituents of emotion (Damasio, 2010, pp. 109, 111). I interpret Damasio's terms "drives" and "motivations" as having roughly the same meaning as "desires", since he exemplifies them with hunger and thirst, which seem like obvious examples of desires (Damasio, 1999, p. 77; Damasio, 1994, p. 116). But just what are desires? Damasio seems to think of them as dispositions in the brain that are meant to help the organism achieve homeostasis (Damasio, 2010, p. 55). That is a third-person-perspective description of the physical realizer of desires and their function. I shall focus mostly on the first-person-perspective experience of desire and return to the physical side later.

From a first-person perspective, "desire" is a concept that can be defined quite widely to include all sorts of wishes and preferences or even judgments that something is good. On the other hand, it can be defined more narrowly to include a feeling often related to pleasure or displeasure. I may judge that something is good (e.g. that I give money to aid projects in Africa), without having a desire that it should happen that I give money to Africa. Since Damasio uses the terms "drives" and "motivational states", he seems to focus on this felt desire which is supposed to lead to action. Hunger is a feeling meant to make the hungry act on their desire and eat, and the same goes for thirst or sexual desire. I thus understand desire as including both a thought that something is good and a feeling that makes the person want the desired state of affairs to happen.

Alfred Mele offers several helpful distinctions when it comes to desires. He defines a desire for A as an A-focused attitude which constitutes motivation for A (Mele, 2003, p. 170). Here one should distinguish between a desire to perform an action (go for a walk) and a desire for a state of affairs to be true (that my team will win the cup) (Mele, 2003, p. 16). Most desires are desires for a state of affairs to come true which include doing something in order for it to come true (I mow the lawn since I desire a nice garden), but not all (I may desire to be someone else). In order to avoid constantly interrupting the text by making reservations about counterexamples, I focus on action desires, which include thoughts about some states of affairs one wants to become true. This way desires are connected to alternatives for action, but the alternative for action is understood as including both the goal and the means, and thus desires are related to both goals and means. I also focus on proximal desires, which include the desire to do something now, although there are also distal desires, which are desires to do something later (Mele, 2003, p. 167).

Mele further distinguishes between occurring and standing desires: I may always desire that there should be peace on earth but that does not mean that that desire is always activated or felt (Mele, 2003, p. 30). Some desires are intrinsic, meaning that one desires something for its own sake (e.g. if one likes to whistle), whereas other desires are instrumental, which is when you desire to do something to achieve something else (go to the dentist in order to have good teeth). Desires can also be a mix of the intrinsic and instrumental; for example, you enjoy swimming for its own sake but also do it in order to get into better shape (Mele, 2003, pp. 33–34).¹¹⁵

One might think that there are just two desires – a desire for pleasure and a deterrent desire for pain – and that all other desires are sub-desires. But some of the most common desires seem to have physical realizers located at different places in the brain, and it is good if the vague concept of desire can be related to something empirical. There are different areas of the brain that can be stimulated electrically and the people stimulated will report that they feel a certain desire. Animal tests confirm the same. The lateral hypothalamus is active when we are hungry or thirsty and also when we see food and drink. If it is stimulated electrically, we will feel compelled to eat and drink, whereas when it has been destroyed in animals they stop eating and drinking and must be force-fed if they

Note the potential confusion that I follow Mele here, who uses the term "intrinsic" to describe a goal in itself, while in the chapter on ethics I describe how Christine Korsgaard says that "intrinsic" should not be conflated with "goal in itself", and so I avoid using "intrinsic" in the sense of "goal in itself" in the ethics chapter. Hopefully, confusion is avoided with this notification.

are not to die.  There are also famous experiments that have discovered what seems to be a pleasure center in the brain. If they are stimulated electrically in humans, the latter will report that they feel great. When animals are allowed to press a button that stimulates them they will continue to do so ceaselessly until they are exhausted (Joseph, 1996, pp. 171–172, 187).¹¹⁶

Obviously, humans have many desires that are not innate. People can desire all sorts of things, like desiring their football team to win, and it is impossible that there should be an innate area in the brain responsible for all kinds of concrete desires. Timothy Schroeder, Adina Roskies and Shaun Nichols give an overview over standard neuroscience on desires. They say that standard neuroscience supports that actions are caused by a physical desire in the brain (Schroeder, Roskies, and Nichols, 2010, pp. 84–87). While we have innate desires, they are changed by beliefs and by emotions, which are parts of beliefs (Schroeder et al., 2010, pp. 87–89, 101). In the brain, different desires point in different directions, all wanting the body to move a certain way. Schroeder et al. compare it with a class of screaming children all wanting to take the others with them in a certain direction, and then the teacher picks out one pupil, who gets to decide. In the same way, the brain selects one desire to cause action (Schroeder et al., 2010, pp. 81–83).

This process of acquiring new desires explains how desires relate to reasons for action. Reasons for action are often divided into three:

It may be confusing to talk about reasons, since the term "reason" is ambiguous. It can mean either an epistemic reason (as in 1 and 2), which is a proposition that makes another proposition more likely to be true, or it can mean cause (as in 3). Furthermore, epistemic reasons can be moral reasons that everyone have for acting certain ways, or individual reasons why something is good for an individual.

These examples strongly suggest that there is a physical side to desire strength and that desire strength can cause action – a topic to which I shall return.

Epistemic reasons connect to both goals and means and thus to alternatives for actions as including both goals and means. For example, I can have reasons to desire a goal, and therefore also reason to desire the means to that goal, which means I have reason to desire the alternative for action that includes both the goal and the desire.

I may seem overly focused on desires as causal explanations for actions – how should we understand the fact that people can act for moral reasons? I believe it happens in accordance with the paragraph before the previous one. We start life with our innate desires, but we can acquire moral goals that we adopt as our own goals and that we desire as good. This happens through different processes as described by psychologists: through parental guidance, development of empathy, processes of recognition, experiencing things as good, developing a moral identity, acquiring habits through practice, imagining scenarios about a good and safe world, etc.¹¹⁷ This all fits well with a process where the autobiographical self can change itself and acquire new desires that can cause actions.

Desires shaped by beliefs about how they are best fulfilled can make desires compete. A person may desire to live well and desire to avoid pain, and believe that if she abstains from sex God will let her live forever, but if she does not there is eternal pain waiting, so these desires and beliefs together make her act on the desires to live and avoid pain and not on the sexual desires. Or a sexual desire can make a person eat less and work out more to impress someone. Thoughts and feelings influence the strength of the different desires. This is important for the question of free will, and before I discuss it further I must discuss what it means that desires have different strength.

Desires as consciously experienced seem to have a variable degree of strength. For example, one can be more or less hungry or thirsty or experience stronger or weaker sexual desire. The strength of desire allows a person to have a preference when they have contradictory desires; the strongest desire is preferred the most. But what is the variable in virtue of which the desire is stronger or weaker? Here I suggest that it is the feeling of pleasure and displeasure which is the main variable, although it comes in different shades, in the same way as different feelings can give different kinds of pleasures or displeasures. The variable is in the amount (how much it occupies the conscious mind) and the felt intensity of the pleasure or displeasure. Pleasure and displeasure are felt in different ways by the one who desires something: she may desire something and feel displeasure since she does not have what she desires, or feel

For a detailed theory combined with neuroscience, see Narvaez (2013).

pleasure when she thinks about achieving what she desires and feel pleasure when she actually does achieve what she desires. Note that this description was concerned with different degrees of consciously felt strength of desire. I shall complicate the picture later by adding a non-conscious and a physical aspect to the strength of desires to explain why we do not always act on the desire that consciously feels the strongest.

So far I have argued that there are competing desires, and that these are influenced by thoughts and feelings. How does such influence happen? We have already seen briefly how Schroeder et al. describe standard neuroscience by saying that we have innate desires that can be changed by thoughts and emotions, but this will now be combined with more details from Damasio and others.

Different desires are triggered by stimuli either from the body or from the world outside. The situation triggers fact memories, both facts about the situation and possibilities in the situation, and autobiographical memories from similar situations and the feelings that the person had in those situations. Autobiographical memories are especially activated if there are strong feelings connected with them. The thoughts about possibilities for action in the situation may also activate autobiographical memories.

Consider this example: A tired man may see an empty chair and desire rest, but he may at the same time see a woman approaching the chair, desire to get to know her, and remember that offering a chair is a way to make positive contact with someone, while swiping the chair in front of them can be considered rude. Maybe he remembers earlier episodes of either offering a chair or swiping a chair, and more generally of getting to know women or being criticized for his behavior. The sight of the woman and the chair can activate thoughts about many possibilities for action and the possibilities that these actions can further lead to, and memories and feelings connected with all of these.

The feelings activated by earlier memories blend in with the feelings that the first desires give rise to. Maybe the man in the example above first had a strong desire for rest and so wanted to sit on the chair, but as he thought about the possibilities of getting to know a woman by offering her the chair and the possibilities of what would happen if he did not offer the chair, chair-offering was connected with good feelings and chair-swiping was connected with bad feelings, and so the felt desire to offer the chair was strengthened and the felt desire to take the chair was weakened.

My wife is a good example of how recalled feelings blend with desires. In the first stage of her pregnancy, the black coffee she usually drank and the pizza I usually cooked made her sick. When her appetite returned, she still did not desire black coffee or my pizza at all, but she did desire different variants of coffee and different variants of pizza. These different kinds of coffee and pizza tasted quite similar to regular black coffee and the pizza I made, but whereas she would desire some kinds of coffee and pizza very much, she would not at all desire something which tasted almost the same, namely regular black coffee and my pizza. The most likely reason for this is that the memory of that special coffee and that special pizza had a bad feeling of sickness connected with it, which reduced her desire for it strongly.

The process I have here described is in essence the following: a situation triggers alternatives for action that a person desires with different degrees of strength, and activated memories mark the alternatives with feelings which change the strength of the desire for each alternative. In this process, every event was causal, because it was all about neural patterns firing and thereby activating other neural patterns with which they were connected.

Damasio describes this process similarly, although quite briefly. In a given situation different alternatives for action are activated, and Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis holds that the different images are connected with feelings. This somatic marking influences which alternatives become conscious at all, and it influences how long we consider something and what we end up choosing, since feelings influence the strength of desire. Parts of this process are conscious and parts of it are non-conscious, according to Damasio (Damasio, 1994, pp. 174, 184–187, 196).

Peter Carruthers also understands the process of practical reasoning like this, and he refers to Damasio when he describes it: we envision different alternatives and register our emotional response to the different alternatives (Carruthers, 2006, pp. 137–138). Also Chandra Sripada thinks similarly when he describes different ways that what he calls the deep self can influence choices (Sripada, 2016). This is important for the question of free will, since it means that the experiences a person has had in her life (including thoughts and feelings) and stored in her autobiographical memory will influence the future choices she makes. Consequently, her autobiographical self will play a causal role in some of the choices she makes.

What happens between the process where, after some deliberation, one desire becomes the strongest and the point when a person acts on her strongest desire? How does the strongest desire lead to action? Damasio does not have much to say about that process. He says that the somatic markings provide incentives for a person to act and that we have an innate preference system for what we like and do not like and dispositions to act in order to achieve pleasure and avoid pain (Damasio, 1994, pp. 174, 179).

Peter Carruthers has developed in much more detail what happens between when a person considers her desires and when she acts. Since his theory is good and fits well with what Damasio says elsewhere, I add it here. Carruthers argues that we have different desire modules, which correspond to the different innate desires that I mentioned above (Carruthers, 2006, pp. 113–114). There is also a different module which Carruthers calls the practical reasoning module. This module selects as its input the desire it registers as the strongest, then starts to follow a set of heuristic rules. A basic sketch of these rules is as follows: The input is a desire for P. The practical reasoning module scans autobiographical and fact memories¹¹⁸ to find a memory of the "If I do Q, then P will occur" sort. If it finds such a memory, it will search through a set of action schemata that are stored in memory and check if such an action scheme is doable here and now.¹¹⁹ If not, then the module will search for memories of the "If I do R, then Q will occur" type in order to make the action scheme doable. If this process goes on for a while without success, the module will turn to the second strongest desire and start the process over again (Carruthers, 2006, pp. 57–58, 131).¹²⁰

The details may be different in real life, but this is a scenario which describes the reasoning process as a causal process. The description above was serial, but the brain probably processes different desires in parallel and then the practical reasoning module selects according to certain rules; for instance, that it is worth considering a very strong desire for a certain period of time before

Carruthers uses the term "belief", but I understand beliefs as fact memories and their implications.

The theory that there are motor schemata guiding our actions has been developed by Richard Schmidt, among others (R. A. Schmidt, 1975; R. A. Schmidt, 2003). The theory explains why many of our actions are not caused directly by desires. Rather, we desire some overarching goal and then motor schemata actualize the desire. For example, when we write something, we do not makeadecision to press every letter; rather there are motor schemata for the different words. There is constant feedback from the world interacting with our desires to find out whether a program should continue or be substituted with another. This happens on small scales and larger scales. An example of a small-scale motor scheme is the fact that when I want to type the word "Damasio" I always write "Damasion", which may well be because I have stored a small motor program for the ending "-sion" on English words. An example on a larger scale is driving familiar routes. When driving from my house I almost always take the same route into a roundabout and further into a tunnel. Sometimes I need to go another way and have to change lanes before the tunnel, but I have often ended up in the tunnel. That is probably because the normal route isastored program and then I have to think consciously about changing lanes when it is time to do so; otherwise I end in the tunnel. The existence of such motor programs is my answer to the charge that event-causal theories of the mind cannot explain how we do many actions that are not directly caused by desires (Steward, 2012, pp. 164–165).

Whereas Carruthers uses this module to describe the whole deliberation process, I employ it to describe the final part of the process: from something becoming the strongest desire to the desire being executed in action. I write more about the physical side of this in the chapter on weakness of will (especially how the basal ganglia get a function from being formed by habits).

choosing to act on a less strong desire instead (Carruthers, 2006, pp. 131–132). The main point is that it is a mechanism which decides the strength of desire and follows a set of heuristic rules to turn the desire into action by selecting an action plan which is sent to the motor neurons for execution (Carruthers, 2006, pp. 131, 138).

Although Carruthers thinks that much of our practical reasoning happens like this, he follows Daniel Kahneman in distinguishing between two systems of reasoning, known as system 1 and system 2. System 1 works fast and quite reliably according to the general rules described above. System 2 is a conscious and slowworking reasoning process, but it is more reliable than system 1 and can trump system 1 decisions (Carruthers, 2006, p. 254; Kahneman, 2011, pp. 20–22). System 2's reasoning processes are typically concerned with important and difficult choices, and since I argued that consciousness plays a causal role this allows for consciousness to have a causal role in important choices.

I have so far argued that the strongest desire leads to action via the workings of a practical reasoning module that translates desires into actions. But there are two objections against this that should be considered, and both have been raised by Alfred Mele. He argues that intentions play an important role in reasoning which cannot be reduced to a combination of desires and beliefs. It is not good enough to say that the strongest desire leads to action, for there are many examples where the strongest desire is not the same as a person's intention. For example, the strongest desire of both Alan and Bob may be to insult Carl at a party, and they do, but still it may be correct that only Bob had the intention of insulting Carl at the party. What the concept of intention adds to the reasoning process, according to Mele, is that intentions settle which desire a person wants to act upon. A person has thoughts and can assess different desires in order to identify the best one and intend to act accordingly.What a person judges to be best can be different from his strongest desire. So in Mele's understanding of the deliberation process there are desires and one of the desires is the strongest, but it is a process of assessment producing an intention which settles which desire will lead to action, and that need not be the strongest desire (Mele, 1992, chapters 8 and 9).

Carruthers also discusses how we should understand the relation between what we judge to be best and what we desire the most. How can the judgment of something as best lead to action? Carruthers answers that we probably have an innate desire to do that which we judge to be best. How then is weakness of the will possible? Weakness of the will is not to do that which you judge to be best. It is easy for Carruthers to answer: even if we have a desire to do that which we judge best, we also have other desires, and sometimes these are stronger. So, even if Bob judged it best not to insult Carl at the party, he did it nevertheless, since his desire to insult Carl was stronger than his desire to do what he judged best (to not insult Carl) (Carruthers, 2006, pp. 391–392).Ishall say much more about weakness of the will in the chapter on free will.

What about intentions? How can a person intend something which is not her strongest desire? Both Carruthers and Damasio think that desires can be at work non-consciously, and it seems that Mele does so as well (Carruthers, 2006, p. 400; Damasio, 1994, p. 185; Mele, 2003, pp. 30, 164). The answer is then close at hand: even if a desire is not felt consciously as the strongest, it is still the strongest in virtue of the non-conscious feelings connected with it, and selected by the practical reasoning module as the strongest. The module selects the strongest desire, and this is what settles the reasoning process. One could use the term "intention", but as long as there are thoughts, desires and a disposition in the brain for transforming the strongest desires into action there is no need for intention as referring to a separate entity in the brain.¹²¹ I shall explain later in more detail what desire strength amounts to.

Using non-conscious desires in this way may seem like a non-falsifiable theory, but I shall defend it later when discussing weakness of the will, and answer more critiques from Alfred Mele. As mentioned above, however, both Damasio and Mele also believe that non-conscious desires influence our choices. Carruthers defends this belief by arguing that it works that way in animals, and that an account of the human mind must be evolutionary in the sense that it can show how the mind has been gradually built from animals to humans (Carruthers, 2006, p. 403). Much more could be said about desire, of course, but here I have said what I need to say about the self and the mind in order to lay the foundation for my solution to the problem of free will, and how to understand thinking and consciousness.

Mele has many suggestions echoing Carruthers, since Mele thinks that there are mechanisms in the brain which by default select what is assessed as best as the intention of the person and activate motor schemata to execute the intention (Mele, 1992, pp. 167, 221, 130–137).

# 6 Thinking

Even if thinking is part of the mind, the topic of thinking has gotten its own chapter. Many would probably accept that emotions, memories and desires are causal processes, but how can thinking be rational if it is a causal process? Several philosophers have objected to the idea of thinking asacausal process by arguing that the theory undermines itself: thinking cannot be rational if it is causal. In this chapter I try to explain how thinking can be both rational and a causal process. I present the theory first, in Section 6.1, and then answer objections in Section 6.2.

### 6.1 A causal theory of thinking

Thinking is probably the topic where most people will have problems accepting that the mind can be a causal process, since thinking seems to occur in its own dimension of rationality, and rationality seems impossible if thinking is a causal process. For example, John McDowell argues that thinking and reasoning happens in a normative space, and that this space of reasons is different in kind from the space of nature. The space of reasons is sui generis, according to McDowell (McDowell, 1996, pp. xv, xix, 72).

I will defend the view that the workings of the mind, including thinking, are causal processes, ultimately reducible to the actualization of fundamental values according to rules. I am not alone in thinking that the mind is a causal process. Alfred Mele defends an event-causal (as opposed to an irreducibly agent-causal) understanding of the mind against many common critiques. He says that a causal theory of the mind was defended by Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Kant and William James, and that even though Wittgenstein and Ryle were against it, it now seems to be the orthodox view (Mele, 1987, p. 31). Mele thinks that no non-causal theory of the mind has been able to answer Donald Davidson's challenge in 1963, which was to specify what it means to decide for a reason if the reason is not understood as the cause of the choice. In virtue of what is it true that a person acts upon a particular goal if it is not that the intention is the cause (Mele, 2003, pp. 39, 58)? Mele uses many arguments to defend causalism and attack non-causalism.¹²²

See Mele (1992, chapter 13) and Mele (2003, pp. 39–50). Another famous defense of a causal understanding of mind is offered in Chalmers (2011).

Even though I do not know in detail how thinking occurs, I do want to spend some time in drawing a coarse but consistent picture of how the common processes of thinking can occur as a causal process. This view I will then defend against objections and use to answer some questions about thinking. Another understanding may be more up-to-date with recent neuroscience, but it is in any case interesting to see just that there is a way of understanding thinking as a causal process that can refute the most common objections. I expect that there are better causal theories of thinking on the market, but offer this as a general defense of the view that rational thinking can be a causal process.

I start by summing up some of the things already said by Antonio Damasio in the previous chapter. I proceed by adding some thoughts from Lawrence Barsalou which fit well with Damasio's thoughts, but extend quite much on several topics. Both thinkers represent the grounded cognition model of conceptual knowledge, which I also lean on.¹²³ I discuss the explanatory potential in Barsalou's thinking before I move to objections. I start now with summing up Damasio's understanding of thinking.

In the previous chapter, we saw how Damasio described the evolution of brains that made representations of the world, which he called images, and reacted to them with dispositions. Images are neural patterns representing something in the body or the world (or a possible world in the case of imagined or false images, meaning images of states of affairs that are not part of the actual world), and these can become conscious. Dispositions, on the other hand, do not become conscious, but determine how such images are processed in the brain. For example, the dispositions allow us to process images in different ways, like manipulating the images or applying reasoning to them (Damasio, 2010, pp. 63, 143).

Although the word "image" suggests something visual, Damasio underscores that it is images of everything – not just sights, but all kinds of sense impressions and feelings – and they can be concrete and abstract, they can be conscious or non-conscious. The images either come from sense impressions or from memory or combinations of these, and the process of mind is a continuous flow of images (Damasio, 2010, pp. 71–72). In addition to images, Damasio thinks that we have dispositions which allow us to store and recall memories, and they are also what make imagination and reasoning possible (Damasio, 2010, p. 143).

From 1970 to 1990 the leading theory of conceptual knowledge was the amodal symbolic model, but since that the grounded cognition model has become more and more popular (Kemmerer, 2014, pp. 274–275).

Damasio seems to use the term "image" for all kinds of conscious experiences we can have, but he does not offer much detail about how thinking occurs in the brain. Lawrence Barsalou has a theory of cognition which fills in many gaps in Damasio's account, which I will present here.¹²⁴ Barsalou argues in favor of understanding images as representations in the mind, and that these are based on perception. Barsalou's theory is that when something is perceived, attention is paid to different parts of the percept, and simpler, analogical structures of what has been perceived get stored in memory. These are called perceptual symbols, and are not like physical pictures or conscious experiences, but rather they are records of the neural patterns underlying the perception. Similar perceptual symbols are stored together and also categorized in larger frames. For example, different perceptions of doors are stored together, as are different wheels, and the frames for doors and wheels are both found in the frame for "car", but also in other frames. For example, doors are also found in the frame for house.

As described in the previous chapter, the brain has certain neurons that register different features in the world and organize them into concepts and categories. This process is well understood, and in more detail than many are aware of. As people learn new concepts, neuroscientists can spot the neural patterns in the brain representing them (so they can know which concept they are thinking about), and they also see that similar concepts are more similar at the neuron level than more different concepts (Bauer and Just, 2015). Not only are objects stored in memory, but also events. When such events are stored in memory, the individual learns which events have which results, which is useful for making choices (Barsalou, 2008, p. 623).

But we do not only register the world, we can also think about things we do not sense. Barsalou explains that this happens by simulators in the brain. A simulator is an ability of the brain to simulate an event or object in our mind, even when we do not perceive it, by employing perceptual symbols from different frames. So for instance, I have watched many chairs, and stored common elements of chairs in the frame for chair, which allows me to imagine a chair anytime I want. A simulator is then a disposition that allows us to imagine something based on information we have stored in our memory. The elements of frames can be combined in new ways to form new objects, new concepts or new propositions, even if these have never been thought of or experienced before. This is a core type of computation that the brain performs (Barsalou, 2008, p. 619).

This presentation is mainly based on Barsalou (1999). Supporting footnotes are also added.

A simulation based on a frame is the equivalent of a concept, and when people make roughly the same simulations they have a common understanding of the concept. Words are stored together with the perceptual symbols that go with their use, so that the word "car" is stored in the frame for car with everything else there that is associated with cars. Hearing the word activates the rest of the content of the frame. This is what it means that the content of the word is understood, namely that one is aware of its connections to other things.

This is a main idea in the grounded cognition model that understanding words and things means that the brain activates other things that they are related to. Brain scanning shows that when you perceive or think of an object, the brain activates areas that represent the different things you associate with the concept: its shape and color (in the fusiform gyrus), the motion connected with such objects (in the middle and superior temporal lobe), and the actions that agents perform with such objects (premotor and parietal areas) (Barsalou, 2008, p. 626; Barsalou, 2016, pp. 84–85).¹²⁵

What about abstract concepts? Barsalou argues that they are all based on a threefold process where we perceive several similar events, then we select specific common traits for these situations (including what persons feel), and these common traits together constitute the abstract concept. So for example, the content of the abstract concept of "anger" is based on several situations where a situation triggers something that makes persons feel and act in certain ways. The abstract concept of "truth" gets one of its common meanings, truth as correspondence, from comparing what a proposition expresses and what is the case in the world in order to check if it is the same or not. And the abstract concept of disjunction (as expressed in the word "or") gets a basic meaning from an imagined state of affairs with an empty slot where two different candidates can be put – one or the other. One might easily imagine how the same recipe could be used with other abstract concepts (Barsalou, 2008, pp. 630, 634). This way of thinking about concepts is how I believe concepts get their intended meaning, and this is how I suggest we should understand what it is to be a concept.

I believe that this is the right explanation of how we humans understand abstract objects: they are understood in light of their connections to different concrete images, most of which do not become conscious to us. If I think of a mathematical "set", I may have a vague conscious image of a kind of container. But I may know the rules for how sets should be applied in mathematics and logic, and there can be some ambiguity, for example, the set of all sets that are not member of themselves, and this is enough to understand what an abstract object

For many other examples, see Kemmerer (2014, pp. 274–285).

is or what an abstract word means (Kemmerer, 2014, pp. 335–338; Barsalou, 2008, p. 634). There is no rational dimension of abstract objects into which my mind enters. There is merely the brain activity described above with the grounded cognition model, and parts of this process is conscious to us.

So far, the focus has been on how concepts of objects and events are constructed, stored, understood and used to think new thoughts. But what about rational reasoning? Barsalou argues that frames allow for categorical inferences. If I have a frame for "lion" which includes "eats humans", I can infer from seeing a particular lion in front of me that it also might well eat humans. The inference is this combination of elements. Such inferences can make me make better choices in concrete situations, like move away from the lion. I can also use simulations to plan for the future, simulating different events which will activate relevant associations indicating possible consequences for me to evaluate.

When it comes to logical reasoning, Barsalou used the example of how the term "or" gets its meaning. The same kind of reasoning could be used to explain other logical arguments. The basic logical structures of arguments can be reduced to sentences connected with the terms "and", "not", "or" and "if-then". These terms are also reducible to combinations of "not" and one of the three others.¹²⁶ These logical terms can also easily be translated into neural firings in simple processes of a neuron being activated or not.¹²⁷

The meaning of the logical terms could be visual images in the same way as Barsalou described "or". His image of "or" was a box with an empty slot where one of two candidates could be put; one or the other. "And" could be a box with an empty slot where both of two candidates was to be put; the one and the other. "Not" could be a box with an empty slot where a candidate was absent; it was not there. And "if-then" could be a box including a candidate; if the candidate is there, then the box is there. This is typically described in logic with Venn diagrams, which are visual illustrations of the logical relations.

One may object to this that it has not been shown exactly how rational thinking occurs as a causal process or how inferences occur, but I think Barsalous's point with inclusion of elements in frames is on spot. It seems to me that our

IF-THEN reduces to NOT A OR B (but also: NOT (A AND NOT B). OR reduces to NOT (NOT A AND NOT B). AND reduces to NOT (NOT A OR NOT B). XOR (exclusive or) reduces to IF NOT A THEN B.

Here is one way: Let two inputs, 1 or 0, produce an output, 1 or 0, like this: AND: If both inputs are 1, the output is 1. If one of the outputs is 0, the output is 0. OR: If one of the inputs is 1 or both are 1, the output is 1. XOR – exclusive OR: If only one of the inputs is 1, the output is 1, otherwise the output is 0. NOT: The output is the opposite of the input: input 1 gives output 0, input 0 gives output 1. For another kind of representation, see Pinker (1997, pp. 101–103).

thinking, by and large, happens by parts being integrated into wholes. This is a way of understanding thinking which fits very well with what else I have said about theoretical frameworks, understanding and truth, so let me unpack it a little.

We have already seen how the brain organizes features into objects and stores them in memory. Objects can be understood as wholes consisting of parts (their properties). Events are also stored in memory, and can be understood as wholes consisting of parts (subevents). Does it also make sense to speak of wholes and parts at the physical level of the brain? That a neural pattern is part of a whole in the brain means that the parts are connected into a whole by synapses. The more often a neural pattern is confirmed as being part of the whole, the stronger the connection gets. Connection strength then functions in a non-perfect way as an indicator of how probable it is that a part belongs to a whole, which is a typical way of how learning occurs in neural networks in research on artificial intelligence (Russell, Norvig, and Davis, 2010, pp. 738–748).

I have already argued that understanding something means to integrate it as a part in a whole. If we integrate it in the whole where it belongs, we understand it correctly; if we integrate it in a whole where it does not belong, we misunderstand it; and if we do not know where to integrate it, we do not understand it at all (Gravem, 1996). The same goes for explaining: To explain something is to integrate it as a part in a whole.¹²⁸ Below, I will argue that meaning also is about integrating something into a whole.

Reasoning is also about finding out which parts belong together in which wholes. Deductive reasoning is to find out whether something is part of a whole. For example, does the whole, "All humans are mortals and Socrates is a human" include as a part, "Socrates is mortal"? When we make a deductive argument, the conclusion is always implied in the premises. This means that the premises are the whole, and the conclusion is a part of the whole that we explicate. Evolution can have selected brains with a disposition for drawing out parts of wholes, and emotion helps us to focus on interesting conclusions

While explaining is the same as understanding, the term "explanation" is typically used for clarification of certain kinds of connection. The most common are explanation by cause, explanation by intention or explanation by function (I believe that the last two can be reduced to causal explanations). If we add explaining what something is (the meaning of things, events and words) and how something is possible, explanations are subtypes of understanding which overlap with them totally. Typically, explanations are formulated in language for others with the goal of finding the best explanation, while understanding can be private in mind and not necessarily searching for the best understanding only. However, I see no basis for making a clear distinction between understanding and explanation, as for example in Wright (2004).

(e.

Inductive reasoning, on the other hand, is to group parts together to a whole, adding pieces that seem to fit into the whole. For example, the part "Jones had a motive for killing his wife" and the part "Jones' fingerprints were on the knife" are put together into a whole, and the piece "Jones killed his wife with a knife" is added. Or: A did X and liked it, B did X and liked it, so I can also do X and like it. Again, evolution has selected brains with a disposition for combining parts into coherent wholes. This is something brains do constantly. The process is a causal process, but the kinds of causal process that have produced offspring are processes that can help the organism achieve goals (more on the goals below).

Having a question corresponds to lacking a connection in a whole, and when we try to find the answer to a question, we test out different candidates by filling them into our gap to see how it makes the other parts connect. For example, my question could be what I could give to my dad for his birthday to make him happy. I want to connect "dad" and "happy", so I test different birthday present candidates to see how they fit with what my dad likes and needs. Hopefully I will find something connecting the parts and then I have an answer to my question. Again, evolution has selected brains that try to fill gaps in wholes or make connections between parts in wholes.

We will get back to free will, motivation and choices in a later chapter, but I mention briefly how this fits into the general picture drawn here. In our minds we have stored wholes describing actions and outcomes. Perceptions from the world and our body can activate such wholes, which again activate desires. For example, seeing the fridge activates the idea of opening the fridge and finding something good, which then activates a desire to open the fridge, which again causes the body to move towards the fridge. Another example would be that you could go to pick up object A, which activates a memory of you often forgetting to pick up B at the same time and having to return, which makes you desire picking up object B at the same time, which makes you do so.

This is of course all extremely brief, but it seems that we have brains that organize parts into wholes and that this can explain how much of our thinking occurs as a causal process. In addition, we need a desire for certain goals in order to get thinking going and in a direction. One of the goals should be a desire for knowing truth, which certainly seems to be something we are born with. I enjoyed hearing my three-year-old asking all the time "why" and asking how things are connected, often with some hilarious suggestions of his own, such as different ways that water might be transported up to the clouds.

Over a very long period of time, humans have learned that some argument structures are efficient means to reach the truth, but we also have a lot of generally useful thinking strategies which sometimes go wrong, as shown in abundance by Daniel Kahneman (Kahneman, 2011). There are many standard ways our minds operate which are not very rational. With this first introduction to how thinking occurs in a causal way, I now turn to some questions and objections which will clarify the position further.

### 6.2 Objections to a causal understanding of thinking

There are different objections to a causal understanding of thinking, which have been raised by serious philosophers and which deserve to be answered. Not all of them are necessarily raised against the kind of theory of thinking I have presented here, but they are typical objections that could be made and questions which I would like to answer to show the coherence of my approach compared with other approaches. Unfortunately, the answers will, as usual, be briefer than what the topic deserves, but again they indicate the direction of my thinking.

There are several problems that might seem unsolved by what I have said so far. Here are some critical questions which I will now discuss: How can representations in the brain be intentional? How can they give understanding? How can they give meaning? How can thoughts and words express the world? How can representations in the brain make thinking into something normative, happening in a space of reasons? How can such an understanding of thinking be a thinking that guides us to truth? Some other questions and problems like the disjunction problem and the misrepresentation problem will be dealt with as subproblems along the way, but these were the main issues. I now discuss these questions in the order just mentioned.

What makes thinking intentional? Intentionality here means aboutness. Thoughts are about something, but how can a neural pattern in the brain be about something, like a horse, when they seem to be two different states of affairs? Approaching this problem, it is common to distinguish between similarity theories and causal theories of representation (Stampe, 1977). The similarity theory says that something represents something else by being similar to that which it represents. A problem for this approach is that it seems that something may represent something else without being similar (a dot in a picture may represent a horse far away without looking like one), or not represent something which is very similar (a picture of Mary may be very similar to a picture of her twin Susie without representing Susie).

The alternative theory is the causal theory, which says that a representation is caused by that which it represents. So if the dot in the picture was caused by a horse, it represents a horse, and if the picture was taken of Mary it represents Mary and not Susie. However, there are problems with the causal theory as well. For if you are hit in the head and that makes you see a dog, we still just want to say that the conscious image of a dog represents a dog and not a hit in the head, even if the image of a dog was caused by a hit in the head.

An additional problem for a representation theory of mind is the disjunction problem: why is a representation of a horse a representation of a horse instead of a representation of a horse or a zebra in disguise or a hit in the head or … etc. (Fodor, 1984)? A third problem is the problem of misrepresentation. How can a representation be said to misrepresent the world instead of the representation meaning just whatever it represents? What makes something a misrepresentation as opposed to a representation? If you look at a zebra and just have a conscious experience of a horse in your mind, why is thatamisrepresentation of a zebra instead of just being a representation of a horse (Lowe, 2000, p. 92)?

In line with the presentation of mind and thinking above, I suggest the following answers to these problems. The first step is how seeing a horse creates a conscious image ofahorse in a person: feature-detecting neurons respond to the different features of the horse. When you have seen a horse (or something else) several times, the brain stores a horse-like image in memory. Seeing something later that looks like a horse makes the person recognize it as a horse, because the neurons that fire in response to horse features activate the stored horse image associatively.¹²⁹

We see the horse asahorse when a stored image of a horse has been activated in our fact memory, but so far no problems have been solved. The next important step is to note that the stored image of a horse in our fact memory is also connected to other facts about horses. The person has beliefs about horses and how horses relate to other things. So on the one hand, there is a horse in the world having such and such features and relating to other entities in the world. On the other hand, there is an image of a horse in a person's mind related to a larger framework in the person's mind of what horses are and do.

Now the questions about representation can be answered. The horse in the world causes an activation in the mind of a horse by light waves through the eyes triggering feature-detecting neurons, triggering a stored image of a horse and its surroundings and other facts about horses and their place in the world, which gives the horse image its horse-meaning. The horse image was triggered because of feature-detecting neurons detecting horse features, and so one could say that both the similarity theory and the causal theory are partially right.

As argued by Barsalou above, and also in Koch (2011).

Now we can define the term "representation" in a wide sense, and not just in the narrow sense of "consistent relation", as it was defined in Chapter 5. The narrow sense runs into problems of disjunction and misrepresentation, but the wide sense does not. Representation in a wide sense means that an image of a horse in your mind, and the other concepts that it relates to in your mind, is structurally similar to the states of affairs that the horse in the world being represented relates to. A representation in this wide sense is a correct representation as opposed to a misrepresentation.

If a person sees a horse standing on the grass in front of him, the horse can be misrepresented in many ways. If it activates the fact memory ofazebra, making the person see it as a zebra, it is a misrepresentation. If it activates a fact memory of a horse, but horses are understood as falling into the category of cats, it is another kind of misrepresentation. If it activates a memory of a horse, but places the horse in the tree above the person instead of on the grass in front of him, it is yet another misrepresentation. But if it represents the horse as a horse placed at the right place in the world and in connection with true facts about horses, it is a correct representation of an experience of a horse. The reason it is a misrepresentation in the first cases and not the last is that only in the last case the image of the horse in your mind and the other concepts that it relates to in your mind are structurally similar to the states of affairs that the horse in the world being represented relates to.

This relating of a horse to a horse framework in the mind also solves the disjunction problem. The representation of a horse is not a representation of a horse or a zebra since it is tightly integrated in mind with horse facts and not zebra facts.

This relating of a horse to a horse framework in mind is also what it means that a representation is intentional, or about a horse. However, there is an important qualification to be made. A concept or a representation in mind can be understood, have meaning, and be intentional by being integratedalarger framework, and this can happen non-consciously. However, these neural patterns in the brain must be such that they could become conscious, and are sometimes conscious, in order for there to be intentionality, meaning and understanding. If they had never been conscious, there would only have been a set of physical structures interacting, and there would not be any content in the terms "intentionality", "meaning" and "understanding" since they require a conscious integration of a concept that is subjectively experienced.

We use these three terms – intentionality, meaning and understanding – to say that something is about something for someone (it has meaning that someone understands), and when such a conscious subject exists, things can be represented also non-consciously and function in the same way as when conscious. But if there was never a conscious subject, if there was onlyapile of cells and neurons interacting with physical objects without consciousness being involved, there would be no experiences about something for someone, which is what these terms mean and should mean. A neural pattern representing a horse cannot be about a horse unless it can be conscious, for if no consciousness existed, it would be neurons firing only and no aboutness. It is the image of the horse in consciousness that makes the conscious experience about the horse, whereas it is the relating of the horse to other horse facts that makes it about a horse.

One could then argue that the terms should be used only for conscious thoughts and not also for non-conscious processes. But it seems to me that we should use the terms also for non-conscious processes, since these are so similar to the conscious processes. We have seen examples of how people could solve card games non-consciously before consciously, and so it seems reasonable to say that people can understand meaning also non-consciously, but we should not say this if no conscious subject is ever involved.

This was the answer to how neural patterns in the brain relate to structures in the world outside of the brain in a way that makes thoughts represent worldly entities. By adding consciousness, thoughts can be about objects in the world and have meaning for someone who understands them. But is it right to use the terms "understanding" and "meaning" if it is just a causal process, or does that require more? I shall consider understanding first, and meaning afterwards.

Can there be understanding if what happens in the mind is caused by brain states relating causally to each other? John Searle is famous for his Chinese Room thought experiment, where a man who does not know Chinese is standing in a room getting messages in Chinese. He consults a book and finds a recipe which says that when a string with such and such symbols comes in, send out a string with such and such symbols. To those receiving the output from the room, it seems that someone in the room understands Chinese, but actually there is nobody in the room who understands Chinese (Searle, 1980).¹³⁰

What is understanding? As mentioned before: To understand something is to put it in a larger framework. If you cannot put it in a larger framework, you do not understand it; if you put it at the right place in the larger framework, you do

In this section, by "understand" I mean "understand correctly", and not "understand at all". The person in the Chinese Room does understand that there are Chinese symbols, but he does not have a correct understanding of what they mean.

understand it; if you put it in the wrong place in the larger framework, you misunderstand it (Gravem, 1996, p. 242). So what determines what is the right or the wrong place? That depends. If we are talking about understanding another person, it must be to place what the other says at roughly the same place as her in a similar framework as she has.

For example, if another person says: "I got lucky with my hunting last night", and by that means she met someone at a bar, she is understood if her utterance is placed in a nightlife framework and misunderstood if it is placed in a hunting-in-the-forest framework. If we are talking about understanding something in the world, then the relation between the object and the world must be roughly similar to the relation between what we are understanding and a framework representing a larger part of the world. So if I see a spark plug, I understand it if I place it at the right place in a motor framework, I misunderstand it if I place it in a TV framework or at the wrong place in a motor framework, and I do not understand it if I have no idea what framework to put it in.

Searle's point with the Chinese Room experiment is to argue that understanding is more than manipulating symbols. Differently put, semantics is more than syntax. But what is the relation more precisely? What extra is required for understanding, or why does the person in the room not understand Chinese? I said that to understand something is to place it at the right place in a framework. In order to do that you need to recognize a pattern so that you can place your piece at the right place in the pattern. The man in the Chinese Room does not recognize patterns he can place correctly, and thus he does not understand them – he just follows instructions blindly. But let us say that the person in the Chinese Room started seeing some patterns after a while, so that he could correctly guess how some sentences should be formed in Chinese. He would still not understand them, but why not?

It is because he is not able to connect them with patterns in the outside world. Since he cannot look out, it is not possible for him to connect the strings of symbols with either the behavior of persons or events in the world. Had he learned which strings of symbols were connected with which events in the world, he could gradually learn and understand Chinese.¹³¹ However, in order

There are two common responses to the argument, which Searle already discusses in his original 1980 article. The first is the system response and the second is the robot response. The system response says that it is not the man in the room who understands Chinese, it is the room as a whole that understands Chinese. To this argument Searle answers that we can imagine that man becomes the whole system. He learns the whole instruction book by heart,

for it to be understanding in the full sense, which includes intentionality and aboutness, consciousness is required, as I argued above (and will say more about in the next chapter, especially in Chapter 7.4 when discussing subjectivity).

From the Chinese Room experiment, it could seem like a little man inside our head – a homunculus – is needed for there to be understanding. While in reality, it seems like our neurons are like little blind persons in a Chinese Room without the opportunity to look outside. It takes some space to explain how conscious understanding can evolve in such a scenario, and much space will be given to it in the next chapter. I will argue that processes inside the Chinese Room (our skull) has started producing qualia matching structures in the world quite well, and out of this a conscious subject has emerged. This conscious subject, integrating concepts in theoretical frameworks, can understand the meaning of concepts and what they are about, but more will be said about this in the next chapter.

From understanding I now move to meaning. The problem of meaning can be understood as the same as the problem of understanding: how can there be meaning (in the sense of something we understand) if what happens in the mind is brain states relating causally to each other? If the problem is thus formulated, I reply as above, since I understand meaning as constituted by how something relates to other things in a larger framework (Puntel, 2008, p. 342).¹³² But the problem of meaning can be phrased in another way to criticize the account here given of thinking: is meaning dependent only on internal events in the mind, or does meaning depend on external factors in the world?

i.e. what to write if he gets such and such symbols in, and he does all the parts of the process, but still he does not understand a word of Chinese.

The second answer to Searle's argument is the robot answer. It says that a lonely brain does not understand, but when it is in a body and interacts with the world, then we have a human being who understands. Searle answers that the man in the room can learn to control the entire robot room and how to control in response to different characters, but he still does not understand Chinese.

What I have suggested isacombination of the system response and the robot response if you add that the robot has sensors. I said above that to understand something is to put it in context. The man in the Chinese Room does not understand anything, because he does not have the opportunity to connect the Chinese characters to things in the world. He is unable to connect the symbols that come in to people and events in the world outside space. But if he had had a window out and saw what people were doing when they sent and received Chinese characters and how they reacted to the movements of the robot room, then he could start to understand Chinese.

This is the sense of meaning as "understandability", and not the sense of meaning as intention/goal or meaning as something positive and valued.

Many accept that meaning depends on external factors in the world, due to some thought experiments developed by Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burges. Most famous is the twin earth example of Putnam, where water on earth is H2O, while on twin earth everything is identical, except that water is XYZ. So when Oscar on earth thinks of water he thinks of H2O, while when Toscar on twin earth thinks of water he thinks of XYZ. But Oscar and Toscar are molecule-to-molecule identical. Putnam thinks that this shows that "meanings just ain't in the head" (Putnam, 1975, p. 227).

The problem is that on the one hand, it seems that what is in the minds of Oscar and Toscar are exactly the same. On the other hand, they are thinking about two different things. Should we then think of their mental content as the same or as different? How should the term "meaning" be used? In Chapter 2, we saw how Frege distinguished between meaning and reference, and said that meaning is the same as a proposition, which is a mental content, while reference is the state of affairs in the world that a person either intends to refer to or which it is perceived that a sentence refers to. With this distinction we can then say that the mental contents of Oscar and Toscar are identical in their internal structure, but they refer to two different things in the world. By saying that their mental images are identical, I mean that the mental images are type identical, since they have the same structure, but they are not token identical, for they occur inside two different heads.¹³³

In everyday language it is easiest to use the word "meaning" in the sense that Putnam does, including its reference, for we are generally interested in what people refer to. But in order to have a precise ontology, we should distinguish between what exists in the mind of an individual and what exists in the world outside. So everything in the minds of Oscar and Toscar is type identical, all their conscious images are identical in structure, but one refers to H2O and the other to XYZ when they think about water.

This solution requires that they refer to different things if everything in their minds is identical, so what makes it true that identical contents of mind can refer to different things? The reason that they refer to different things is the causal relation between H20 and the word "water" in Oscar's world, and the causal relation between XYZ and the word "water" in Toscar's world. The causal relation is important, since any linguistic expression can express any state of affairs in the world. If I put a series of Xs and Ys on a blackboard, they can express soccer

Much criticism against the kind of internalism I sketch here can be rejected by use of this token-type distinction (as employed in Kim (2006, pp. 265–266)). Different truth conditions or different indexical references show that Oscar's and Toscar's thoughts are not token identical, but they may still be type identical.

players, battle ships, or whatever states of affairs there are in the world, and so I must say what I mean by them. In Chapter 2 we saw how a reference relation is established between words and what they refer to.

The meaning of words can then change over time, and people can learn meanings of words without any causal influence from states of affairs in the world, but there must be a first causal link between a state of affairs and a linguistic expression via a mind. This means that if Oscar were to visit Toscar and thought to himself, I would like a glass of water, he would be referring to H2O, which is the object named water that he learned the name of. But if he were to see XYZ, point at it and say, "That water looks nice", he would be referring to XYZ. As long as we do not insist that there must be a correct reference, but merely intended and perceived references, there is no metaphysical problem here.

Many externalists will agree that mental entities are located in the head, and only insist on external factors sometimes being necessary to individuate thoughts. But some externalists are more radical and insist that the vehicles for thoughts are located outside of the body. Some even argue that consciousness is located outside of a person's body. Those who argue that vehicles for thoughts are located outside the body typically argue that when we use paper and pen to calculate or remember addresses, etc., the text on paper is a vehicle for thought taking part in your cognitive process, which should not be rejected as a vehicle for thought even if it is not located in the head. As Andy Clark and David Chalmers argue, if a data chip in your brain helped you think, it should be considered a part of your cognitive system, even if it were then to be removed from your head but kept doing the same job (Rowlands, 2003, chapter 9).

This is of course a matter of definition, for what is to count as "a cognitive process"? But so far I have only been interested in understanding ontologically the structures that give rise to qualia, and I have argued that these are all in the brain, but maybe someday someone will invent something which can have or cause qualia. Thus I cannot see that vehicle externalism presents an argument against the understanding of thinking that I have presented in this chapter. But some also argue that consciousness is located outside of the head, and that may be an argument against my understanding of thinking.¹³⁴ I will return to the question of the location of consciousness and qualia in the next chapter.

Having now seen how thoughts can be about something and have meaning, even when they are internal to the mind, I shall consider a final kind of critique.

See for example Puntel (2008, pp. 354–355) and Pettit and McDowell (1986, pp. 137–168), but I am not certain about this interpretation of any of them.

The charge is that thinking must be more than a causal process in the brain if thinking is to be normative, attending to reasons and even guiding to truth. I shall treat these as two separate critiques, the first about the normativity of thinking and the second about the reliability of thinking, and I start with the question of normativity.

I have already dealt with this challenge briefly, and mentioned John McDowell as an example of the critique. I will here say a little more about his view that thinking and reasoning happens in a normative space, and that this space of reasons is different in kind than the space of nature – the space of reasons is sui generis (McDowell, 1996, pp. xv, xix, 72).

Empiricists like to think of the empirical reality as a standard for whether our thoughts are correct: do they fit reality or not? This is a concern for John McDowell as well: How can the world be a measurement for whether our thoughts about the world are correct (McDowell, 1996, p. xii)?

But this reality which is a standard for whether our thinking is correct is only accessible to us as another thought that we can relate our other thoughts to. So, normative thinking is a matter of coherence among thoughts, even if we think that there exists something prior to language that language can express. The way that the world is a measurement for our thoughts (normative) is that it actually is the most coherent theory of the world that does the job as the measurement for our thoughts, as described in Chapter 2 of this book.

But what about the charge that agents act for reasons, and reasons cannot be understood as causes?¹³⁵ To act for a reason can be understood causally in the following way, using the chair example from before: A person sees a chair and a woman approaching. The visual impression of the chair and the woman activates in him two desires; a desire to sit and a desire to get to know her. The same visual impression also activates fact memories like the fact that he can offer the chair in order to get to know the woman, and that it will be considered rude to grab the chair in front of the woman. These fact memories further activate autobiographical memories concerning being rude before and bad feelings connected to that and of being polite to women before and good feelings connected to that. The good feelings remembered get connected to the desire to offer the chair and the bad feelings remembered get connected to the desire to sit. The desire to offer the chair becomes the strongest and activates the motor neurons that makes the man offer the chair. In this process, every event was causal, for it was all about neural patterns firing and thereby activating other neural patterns that they were connected to. But the process could also be described as a man acting for a rea-

As argued in McDowell (1996, pp. 73–75) and Bok (1998, pp. 203–204).

son. He offered the chair; the reason was that he wanted to get to know the woman, which was his strongest desire. Acting for reasons does not exclude acting for causes. Many more examples of how reasonable thinking can happen as a causal chain were given in the beginning of this chapter in the presentation of Lawrence Barsalou.

The final critique to be considered here is whether or not we can trust our thinking if the capacity to think is a result of evolution. Alvin Plantinga is most famous for his evolutionary argument against naturalism, and Victor Reppert has made a similar case with his argument from reason. Both refer to a similar argument made by C. S. Lewis (Plantinga, 1993, chapter 12; Reppert, 2003; C. S. Lewis, 1947). I shall focus on Plantinga's argument here.

Plantinga's argument is that we have little reason to trust our own ability to think if it has evolved naturally, since a naturalistic evolution does not care about truth, only about survival. So if a false belief makes you better suited for survival, evolution will favor the false belief (Plantinga, 1993, chapter 12). The obvious response to this is to suggest that understanding how the world is and works and being able to make valid inferences increases survival fitness. But Plantinga argues that there are several scenarios where false beliefs and invalid inferences produce the same effect as true beliefs and valid inferences. Maybe a person runs away from a tiger because he wants to be eaten by a tiger, but thinks that this tiger will not eat him; or he thinks that the tiger is a cat he wants to cuddle, and thinks that the best way to cuddle a tiger is to run away from it (Plantinga, 1993, pp. 225–226).

Even though such fanciful alternatives can be invented for specific situations, it would be extremely difficult to make a detailed sketch of how a gradual increase of false beliefs and invalid inferences gave more and more survival fitness compared to true beliefs and valid inferences. However, Donald Hoffman has received quite much attention with his "evolutionary argument against reality", arguing that we have no reason to believe that our conscious experiences are anything like the real world since they are evolved for fitness only and not for truth. His point is that our understanding of the world, while still useful, could be an extremely distorted version of the real world. As an example he says that it is useful to just perceive the icons on our PC screen and manipulate them to do things, even if the reality behind the screen is very different from these icons (Hoffman, 2015).

Can we trust our thinking if it is a result of evolution? Several distinctions are useful to answer this question. First of all, this discussion takes place using the reason that we have, and it remains a possibility that that we are deceived without knowing it. This would have been the case even if our thinking was not a product of evolution. Had it been created directly by God, it could still be deceived by sin or Satan or whatever. But even if it is possible that we are deceived without knowing it, it is also possible that we are not so deceived, and we shall consider reasons for believing that we are not.What we are discussing is whether we should be skeptical about the ability of reason, given that it is a result of evolution. Does evolution imply that we should be skeptical towards reason?

We should then distinguish between what is a reasonable argument considered as such, and how individuals reason.We know that individuals often reason in poor ways, and that there are some general ways of reasoning which evolution has provided us with, which are often efficient, but quite often also very misleading.¹³⁶

The question of how individuals reason is different from the question of whether we can trust what is commonly taken to be a reasonable way of arguing. Can logically valid arguments be taken as a reasonable means for discovering truths, and what about inductive arguments? Logically valid arguments have proven useful and trustworthy since the days of Aristotle. Inductive reasoning is much more contested, although I think that a good case can be made for inductive reasoning understood as reasoning with the criterion of coherence.

In any case, one can question both deduction and induction and ask whether we can trust in reason understood this way, or whether instead this is just a product of evolution useful for survival, but not actually giving a true understanding of the world. Could the concepts we use in logical arguments be totally misleading when it comes to how the world is structured?

We get a good indication that we must at least approach the truth from the fact that we have well-functioning technology. This is formulated as the no-miracles argument already mentioned by scholars like J. Smart and H. Putnam, who say that we have good reason to believe that our understanding of the world is close to truth, since otherwise it would be a miracle how we are able to fly to the moon, etc. (Ladyman et al., 2007, p. 69). James Ladyman makes the point that many theories have been wrong even if they gave us correct predictions and allowed for development of technology, such as the caloric theory of heat or the ether theory of light. Against this charge, Ladyman replies that even though the theories changed, they retained a structural similarity, meaning that we have good reason to think that the main structures of many of our theories are right even if new concepts may prove better in the future (Ladyman et al., 2007, p. 93).

The no-miracles argument gives us reason to trust in our reason, at least that our reason is on the right track and that scientific methods and criteria are good

For numerous examples, see Kahneman (2011).

guides towards truth. We do not know how far away we are from the final truth, and thus we do not know how efficient our reason is. But in any case, it seems clear that a causal understanding of thinking can explain how our reasonable thinking actually occurs in this world.

You could object that we may think the no-miracles argument is good because our reasoning is so flawed, but that is a kind of skeptical possibility which one can always raise, but which we have no reason to believe and which well-working technology gives us reason not to believe. One could still object that given evolution we should distrust reason, but since reason is in fact good, we should reject evolution. Against this, I have described how evolution could give rational thinking, and it is a description which also explains many flaws in our thinking. Overall, I thus find there to be best reasons to believe that a reasonable reason has resulted from evolution. That does not secure me from the objection that I may fool myself, or that we live in a computer simulation, etc., but this is possible no matter what theory of reason you have.

This was the last of the objections on the list, so I conclude that one can have a coherent theory of thinking as rational while still being a causal process. This implies that rationality, as well, is reducible to values actualized according to rules in line with the main picture from Chapter 3. I expect the presentation of thinking in this chapter to be unsatisfactory for many, but in the next chapter I will present in much further detail a theory of how our conscious mind could gradually evolve.

### 7 Consciousness

In this chapter, we will dig into some really big questions, and I will be proposing several new theories. I start in Section 7.1 by presenting the concept of consciousness, often also called qualia. In Section 7.2 I continue with presenting some of the main problems and theories of consciousness. At the one end of the spectrum of theories you have substance dualism, where consciousness and the physical are two different substances. At the other end, you find reductive physicalism, which rejects that consciousness exists as anything other than something physical. In between, there are different kinds of non-reductive physicalism, property dualism, emergentism, and panpsychism. Since panpsychism has become increasingly popular, I spend some extra time discussing it.

I will be defending a specific kind of non-reductive physicalism, where consciousness is not physical, even if the physical is primary in causing the content of what we are conscious of. A major problem for such a view, but also a problem for all views, is how to understand the causal role of consciousness. Section 7.2 suggests a new theory for how to understand this, and since it is a big and important topic, it covers several pages. This part includes a theory of how the contents of our consciousness could gradually develop through evolution and become what they are.

There are several other difficult questions connected to the topic of consciousness, which I discuss in Section 7.3. The most important one is to look deeper into what consciousness is, ontologically speaking. Here I go into detail on how to think of consciousness as values actualized in a qualia field, which is also a new theory of consciousness – and I present a new theory on the interaction between consciousness and the physical, namely as interaction on the level of field equations.

Section 7.4 deals with other problems of consciousness: how something physical can cause conscious experiences; where consciousness is located; how my consciousness is connected to my body and your consciousness to your body; how subjectivity is possible; and why only the subject has access to consciousness. I start now with defining "consciousness" and "qualia".

### 7.1 The concept of consciousness

The common understanding of humans and their minds in evolutionary biology is that they are organisms made out of cells. They receive input like light waves and sound waves through their sense organs, and these give rise to neural patterns in the brain. In addition, there are consciously experienced images, like the sight of a red tomato, the sound of a trumpet, or the feeling of hunger, and there are thoughts, such as the thought that Hitler died in 1945. But what are these images and thoughts? Where are they? Who is seeing them or thinking them? If you close your eyes and imagine a car (or dream of one), you are not actually seeing a car with your eyes and there is no car in your brain, so where is this conscious experience of a car? A trumpet can make the air vibrate, which again makes little hairs in your ears vibrate, and this gives rise to a consciously heard sound. If some of those hairs are damaged, they can start moving on their own and the brain interprets it as an incoming sound, resulting in tinnitus and constant sound (Matthews, 2000, p. 101).¹³⁷ But out there in the world there are only air and hair vibrating, and there is no sound in the brain, so where is this consciously heard sound? And where is the thought that Hitler died in 1945? We might find the neurons that give rise to the thought that Hitler died in 1945, but they are not the conscious thought. Let us assume that the neurons giving rise to the thought that Hitler died in 1945 occupy two millimeters of space in the brain: would anyone say that this thought about Hitler is two millimeters long? And who is seeing the car, hearing the sound, and thinking the thought if there is just an organism consisting of a lot of cells? None of the single cells or neurons can see or hear or think, so what is this self that can see, hear and think?

Conscious images are often referred to as qualia, but the term is defined in many different ways. For example, Jaegwom Kim defines it quite narrowly, whereas I follow John Searle and define it more widely to include all mental states with a subjective character, including thoughts (Searle, 2002, p. 40; Kim, 2006, p. 15). I use this wide definition since the key problems seem to be the same: they are subjective experiences requiring a self, they are private and possible to introspect, and they are difficult to locate in space.

A famous definition of qualia is that there is something it is like for a subject to experience them (Nagel, 1974, p. 436). Presumably it is not like anything for a hat to be a hat or for a hat to hear a trumpet sound,¹³⁸ but there is something it is like for me to be me or for me to hear a trumpet sound, and the trumpet sound is different from a flute sound because they are different qualia. Qualia defined like this are the same as phenomenal consciousness, the qualitative experiences we are aware of, like sense impressions, thoughts, feelings, and desires.

The tinnitus example also strongly supports the idea that the brain creates conscious experiences.

I comment on the possibility of panpsychism below.

Note the two different aspects that qualia are like something for someone – there is both the fundamental subjectivity that it is for someone and the variety that such experiences can be different, like seeing red or blue or smelling or thinking etc. I return to these nuances later, but the fundamental issue at interest is that there are these different experiences that can be subjectively experienced at all (that they can be for someone).

In the following, I will use the term qualia in a very wide sense with the same meaning as mental properties, including both phenomenal perception and intentional states. Qualia here means all the structures you can be conscious of: a red tomato that you consciously experience is a quale, consisting of the qualia red, round, tasty, etc., and so is the conscious thought of a tomato, all of which I think it is like something to have.¹³⁹

### 7.2 Theories and problems of consciousness

I will now discuss some common theories about consciousness and some of the most common problems they are considered to have. Cartesian substance dualism is the view that there are two different kinds of substances in the world – physical substances and conscious substances. Physical substances have extension; conscious substances do not. Substance dualism is riddled with problems. I will not spend time discussing them here, but will instead list several problems to show why very few philosophers of mind support substance dualism (Kim, 2006, p. 51). How are consciousness and bodies connected? Why does it hurt my non-physical soul when a hammer hits my physical thumb? If souls are non-spatial, how are they connected with the body they control, and why can they only control that specific body and not others? How does consciousness make a physical body move? We know quite well which substances in the brain make the motor neurons in the brain make the body move (for example, acetylcholine), but does a non-physical soul produce acetylcholine or how does it relate to it?

While it is common not to include intentional states in the concept of qualia, some do, like for example John Searle (Searle, 2002, p. 40). The view seems to be shared by various neuroscientists, who say that the difference between perceptions and thoughts lie in degree of vividness (Ramachandran and Hirstein, 1999, p. 103; Damasio, 1994, pp. 96–97, 101, 108). Giulio Tononi uses the term consciousness to refer to any experience (Koch and Tononi, 2014, 20:58). By terms such as "conscious mental states" or "consciousness", I mean the same as qualia in this wide sense.

Descartes thought that consciousness unites with the body in the pineal gland, but nothing is explained by saying where it happens. Is the soul a spiritual entity that flies after the body when we walk (or fly in an airplane), or is it stuck in the body? It seems strange that it should fly after my body, but if it is not physical, how can it be connected to the body, or transfer energy to make the body move? When I die, how is the soul released? That a non-physical entity causes physical motion breaks with the principle of conservation of energy, and is not supposed to be possible (Kim, 2006, pp. 46–49). Does substance dualism imply that all insects with minimal mental life have immortal souls? Where does our non-conscious mental life fit in – is it conscious or physical? What happens to the soul when we have dreamless sleep, when our consciousness is turned completely off (Searle, 2011b)?

As shown above, substance dualism has a number of inherent difficulties. We have seen many reasons to believe that the brain causes qualia. These and other reasons have made most philosophers of mind opt for physicalism as an alternative to substance dualism. Many were led to physicalism in order to have a theory that could bridge the physical and the mental, since the mental in itself was then just understood as something physical and mental causation then just like any other event causation: The world influences the brain and the brain makes the body move, and the gap between consciousness and the body has been closed.

However, there are two major variants of physicalism. Reductive physicalism says that everything which exists is physical. This became a popular view at the time of behaviorism, and was adopted by identity theorists who believed that consciousness is identical to brain activity and functionalists who believed that consciousness is a function of the brain. Reductive physicalism has lost popularity in the last 50 years. The reason is that it does not explain the seemingly non-physical properties of qualia, and in many cases rather explains them away by saying they do not exist. Reductive physicalists who are eliminativists, like Daniel Dennett, claim that qualia do not exist, although they obviously do (although it might be that the qualia Dennett rejects are defined differently than how I define them) (Dennett, 1991).¹⁴⁰

The most popular view in philosophy of mind now is non-reductive physicalism (Kim, 2006, p. 275). There is a narrow and a wide definition of non-reductive physicalism. The narrow view is that consciousness is physical but not reducible

The book is often called Consciousness explained away. In lectures, John Searle liked to quote David Armstrong, who replied with the following when Searle said he believed in the existence of qualia: "You believe in spooks!"

to brain activity. The wide view is that consciousness is non-physical, and yet the physical has ontological priority. Both views hold that consciousness supervenes on the physical, but supervenience can be understood in a wide or a narrow sense, where the wide sense allows consciousness to be non-physical even if there is no change in consciousness without a change in its physical basis (Kim, 2006, p. 12).

In the case of non-reductive physicalism, the relation between the mental and the physical again becomes difficult to understand, for how can the physical produce consciousness? These are so-called hard problems of consciousness: What is qualia? Why and how does the physical bring forth qualia, and why do qualia become the way they are (Chalmers, 1995)? There are no agreed upon answers to these questions. Non-reductive physicalists who defend non-physical qualia tend to be either property dualists or emergentists. Property dualists hold that physical things can have non-physical properties, like consciousness. Emergentists hold that when physical things relate to each other in certain ways, new properties emerge. For example, wetness emerges when water molecules interact in specific ways, so also consciousness can emerge when the brain behaves in certain ways.¹⁴¹

Both property dualists and emergentists still face difficulties, especially in relation to the principle of causal closure. The principle of causal closure says that every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause if it has a cause at all (Kim, 2006, pp. 195–197, 290–291; Papineau, 2009, p. 59). The principle is equivalent to the principle of conservation of energy insofar as there are no other kinds of energy than what physics today recognizes (Papineau, 2009, pp. 55–57). The principle of causal closure is not proved; it is a presupposition with much inductive evidence in its support. The inductive support is that physical causes are usually found for all physical events. Also when it comes to human actions, brain events seem to cause them. As Jaegwon Kim notes, the principle of causal closure is a presupposition of the belief in a complete physics, and so a principle few physicalists are willing to reject (Kim, 1998, p. 40).

A distinction is often made between weak and strong emergence. The distinction is made in different ways, but according to Timothy O'Connor the main distinction is whether or not the emergent properties are compatible with physicalism in the sense that they are determined by physical properties (O'Connor, 2020). My own understanding does not fit easily into the established categories because of my understanding of laws of nature taking states of affairs into account, my distinction between content and quality of consciousness, and consciousness having a special causal role to be explained soon. In my understanding, all causal power is in the base, but the base includes non-physical qualia values and laws of nature. It can thus be called either weak or strong emergence, depending on how the terms are defined.

The problem that the principle of causal closure leads to for property dualists and emergentists is the following: Either they allow that consciousness have causal effects, but then they violate the principle of causal closure, or they accept the principle of causal closure, but then consciousness is without causal effect, and that is epiphenomenalism.