If I want to move my hand, I can just decide to move it.
Nothing stops me from doing so. *moves hand* See?
But the question is, did I move my hand because I chose and decided to? Can my conscious thought drive this action?
Defining the question
Let’s start at the top. What is consciousness? The first definition offered by a google search is “a state of being aware of and responsive to one’s surroundings”. Two ideas are being offered here: perception, and responsiveness.
Sitting here in my chair, I can hear a car driving past. The sound waves reach my ear drums and my brain registers the signal. It enters my short-term memory and I know it happens. I perceive it.
But more than this. I perceive my own thoughts. I perceive myself weighing different options. I perceive my emotions, my sensations.
My leg starts to get uncomfortable from being in the same position for too long. I sense the discomfort, feel that I should move it, and my brain sends the signal to my leg muscles to adjust its position. I respond.
It’s interesting that these two ideas are tied together in the definition, as if they are somehow related.
And how about consciousness being a state? Is it a physical state? A mental state? What even is a mental state? It can’t be a state of consciousness, of awareness and perception, or that would be a circular definition. Probably, what we mean by a mental state is a physical representation of one’s nervous system and the chemicals, hormones and charged/discharged states of neurons in all the different sections of one’s brain. This sounds strange, but is intuitive in some way: everything else has a physical representation in the world, so why should consciousness(and by extension, conscious thought) be any different?
To put it all together, consciousness is the physical state of perceiving and responding.
Explaining the apparent conscious direction of thought
What about conscious thought? It appears, that I am able to direct my attention, my awareness towards different directions. I can think about my fingers pressing the keys, about my breath, or the itch on my cheek. Our earlier definition of consciousness already has an answer for this. The physical system of my nervous system and brain interact, together with the input sensory data through my eyes, ears, nerves, in deterministic physical processes to go from one “mental state” to the next.
In other words, there was no other way I could have responded in that situation. I couldn’t have not moved my hand.
How could that be? I thought about my hand, and decided to move it, and moved it. I’ve been doing this my whole life! Well, correlation does not imply causation. The perception of thinking about my hand, of deciding to move it, and of subsequently of it moving, does not mean that my awareness caused my hand to move.
For how could it? How can the immaterial affect the material? My perception is merely that, perception. The physical processes of my body are managed by the state of my neurons, my hormones. I(or the perception of I) am nothing but a passenger with a toy steering wheel in this car that is my mind. I am a projection on the monitor that merely reflects what is happening within the CPU.
A more realistic picture of how my hand moved follows. My brain is wired to seek certain outcomes(exactly which outcomes is a topic for another treatise). One of those outcomes is to prove points. I was trying to make a point about conscious thought, and so my system moved my hand to prove the point, with the side-effect of my perception thinking that it was the one who did the job.
Introducing terms for clarity
From here on out, I will refer to our conscious mind and awareness, the passenger in the car as our consciousness, and the physical systems of our brains and nervous system, together with our sensory input, which actually cause our actions as our mental state. The consciousness is born from the mental state, as a side effect of perception for sensory input.
The consequences of determinism
- Our consciousness has no agency in its experiences
- Our actions are purely a result of our mental state
The joy or tragedy of having no agency
Our mental states cause the actions which make our consciousness feel good. On the other hand, they also cause our oft humanly poor behavior, but our consciousness is the one which perceives all the suffering for it. For example, Tom’s mental state might cause him to punch his boss and get fired, but his consciousness will perceive the sadness of losing his job, the guilt and the possible subsequent drop in quality of life from lost income.
Punishment and reward
Why should we punish someone if they never committed the crime? We should not.
Any kind of punishment, however, will always incidentally wrongly punish the blameless consciousness, for it is born from the mental state, whose future behavior we are trying to manipulate through the punishment.
The paradox of a deterministic future
The paradox is that our thoughts have agency, our perception of our thoughts has no agency, but we cannot separate the two, as one is born from the other. So where do we go from here?
Well, the good news is that by reading and thinking about this, your mental state has already begun to change. It is learning that it is the cause of your sufferings and your joys, and that it has to step up its game, because your consciousness can’t do anything to help it. It is learning not to blame your consciousness for failures, not to praise your consciousness for successes, and to let your consciousness just feel, unbiasedly, un-afraidly, humbly.
After all, if I want to move my hand, my mental state can just decide to move it.