Causation and the Objectification of Agency

ion (henceforth: ‘MoA’) promises, will not try to achieve more than it can deliver. In particular, this means that if a concept of free action is applied prospectively or retrospectively, the action does not really have to be free to underpin the causal judgment to which the concept of free action is applied. Causes are evaluated as hypothetically performed actions, but actions have been explained as events that have a natural origin in the physics of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, which I have not analysed further and whose theory might require causal notions after all. My method does not ultimately decide on which of the two, cause or action, has the ontological prevalence. But in order to underpin judgments, actions have the advantage of exploiting the first-person perspective, which yields a non-circular account, whereas analysis based on objective causes, like James Woodward’s theory, seem to run into difficulties at some point. The order of the three levels of abstraction, which reflects the course of the argument of my thesis, depends critically on the first-person perspective. This dovetails with the fact that the identity of acting and judging agent posited by LoA1 is not explained further, whereas LoA2 merely approximates diachronic identity of the (observed) agent by the idea of centralisation. Markovian models like Bayesian networks, which belong to LoA3, cannot make sense of identity, except via the (extra-logical) interpretation of their variables. From the point of view of my argument, the problem with those variants of materialism that do not posit subjects as distinctive kinds of entities is the assumption that a subject can ‘model itself’ like it can model all the other objects it observes (and which are observable by other subjects, too). This leads to some problematic results like the account by Dennett (1991) of how Mary, the colourblind scientist, can anticipate her first experience of colours because she has knowledge about it by reading books about the neurophysiology of colour experiences. According to Dennett, that would enable her to judge whether certain prepared objects are truthfully coloured, because she would be able to watch her own reaction to the exposition and compare that to the expected reaction according to her disposition. Although it is conceivable that some bodily reaction of one’s own body can be observed, it is by no means guaranteed that it is possible to the degree required by Dennett’s argument against the reality of qualia, since two faculties of the subject – the reaction and its observation – would operate at the same time. On the side of actions, this corresponds to completely objectifying one’s acting body, as if one is one’s own puppeteer. But our body is steered 54 Since a thermodynamic picture like the one outlined in chapter 6 has both actions and causes depend on drawing boundaries, it is plausible that there is no ontological order of causal concepts to begin with; at least if we read causation as a binary relation, which is a conceptual choice. In that case, such ontological questions arise at the level of regularities, not at the level of causation.