This is a summary of our last class, with details for the future. If people want to work on this for their final papers, let me know; if a lot of you do we will go into it more later, but for now I think we should keep canvassing different views and get the compatibilists their fair say.
O'Connor made the intriguing suggestion that 'emergent' selves might serve as plausible loci of agent-causation within a naturalistic worldview. The idea here can perhaps be drawn out by parallel to dualistic free will. For the dualist, the non-material mind is automatically 'on another level' or 'outside the physical universe' in important ways; so it can be an uncaused cause of things within the physical universe. Aside from worries about causal interaction and unity, though - which are not intrinsically 'physicalist' or 'naturalist' in character - the dualist picture also seems to simply push the questions back to another level. What creates the non-material mind? Is it determined by prior non-material causes, or is it free? In what does its freedom consist? If the non-material mind has beliefs and desires, do those determine its actions? (The analogy here to questions about what is the ultimate cause of God if God is the ultimate cause of the world is exact, in my view.) I don't say that these questions are insoluble, except perhaps the causal unity issue - which I have never been able to see my way around - but they are serious.
The 'emergent self as the locus of free will' approach gets around the hard questions the dualist must answer by making the 'other level' within the same causal network as the other stuff. Emergent selves would be entities which are made up of or constituted by ordinary physical stuff (atoms, genes, etc.) but whose persistent structural organization introduces new causal powers into the world which do not reduce to the causal powers of their constituent parts. Such selves would be constitutionally dependent on the way the world is, but not causally dependent on the way the world is, because the actions they caused would be traced back to them rather than to their various constituents.
The defender of this view still has to answer the 'Propson objection', namely that if these emergent selves have something like a particular self-character that emerges from particular details of their structure, then even if the selves bring about new causal powers, it will be plausible to suppose that those new causal powers depend on prior causes which led to the whole to be organized in precisely the way it is. Further, denying this would seem to entail that the 'self-structure' must be shared among all human selves - but is it? I suppose there's a line of thought through Husserl and Heidegger that might at least offer some support to this claim, but the idea of structural phenomenological invariants of human experience is controversial, to put it mildly. Another possibility would be quasi-Kantian in nature: there is some kind of transcendental structure of selfhood which is filled in through our particular history and decision-making but which is nonetheless somehow prior to it. This is going to be hard, but I think it would be interesting to see how the going goes.
Also, though, there are going to be questions about emergence that the dualist does not have to answer, as well as questions about object-causation and the metaphysics of personhood that the dualist will also have to answer. In the next post I'll put up a list of things that I think the naturalized defender of libertarian free will has to provide us to make out a case for naturalized libertarian free will.
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