By Ting Huang
(See all posts in this series here.)
In a prior symposium on the book I posed the following clarifying questions to Vierkant regarding his stance on free will: Does “managerial control” provide basis for moral responsibility? In line with Holton’s conception of choice, what role does consciousness play and does the arbitrariness on the conscious level endorse determinism? What is intention and does intentional agency provide basis for the libertarian account of free will? Regarding the account of willpower presented, how does it respond to the cliched Schopenhauerian doubt that one can do what one wills but cannot will what one will? In this brief commentary, I will aim at an argument that might not be in line with the author’s intentions – the tinkering mind against free will, and I do so primarily relying on the extended cognition parallel that’s brought into sight by the author.
As mentioned in a short opinion piece that Vierkant took part in, Free Will without Consciousness, experiments showing decision-related neural activity preceding volitional actions have dominated the discussion about how science can inform the free will debates.[1] Not only in science, philosophical discussions on free will thereafter also bear these experiments in consideration and discussions on free will, especially compatibilist accounts, frequently ultimately rest on how to define freedom. That very paper demonstrates a vivid example, which in the end, whilst conceding “our decisions are affected by biases, internal states, and external contexts”, rests freedom on our “ability to resist influences contrary to our preferences and reasons”. We can always further question, where does this ability come from and does it ultimately stem from an “active” action, to begin with?
The Tinkering Mind adds extended cognition to this debate. It adopts doxastic involuntarism and brings into sight a parallel between belief-acquisition with agentive shepherding actions facilitating the acquisition of a belief and the cognitive process in extended cognition – if you cannot neatly separate writing down numbers from cognition, nor can you separate agentive shepherding from cognition – both are constitutive rather than mere causal parts of the cognitive process.
However, invoking cognitive extension account not only introduces the causal/constitutive relationship between the parts, it also, as pointed out by the author, involves the looping/feedback relationship of the parts – in the case of extended cognition, “there are constant feedback loops between the internal and external ongoings”, comparably there will be feedback loops between belief acquisition and intentional shepherding/catalytic actions – each intentional catalytic action will require a prior belief acquisition that “shepherds” the agent into the shepherding action that constitutes the acquisition of a belief. And if we fully endorse doxastic involuntarism, there’s no way we can neatly attribute freedom in the process.
Even if we leave aside the feedback loop position, intuitively, intentions that shepherd one to judge something seem to naturally involve a prior belief that propels one to that intention. Thus if belief acquisition is involuntary, our shepherding is not “free” either. Extended cognition accounts “extend” our cognition to the exterior, and in this case, in parallel, belief acquisition “extend” to intentional shepherding. It seems rather that the passive part of cognition is extending over its “active” part.
The book itself does not directly draw on, or rather intentionally evades the philosophical free will debate and considers it “does not capture the main ingredient that makes ordinary people attribute freedom of the will to themselves”.[2] It is a fair point. It does draw us to question, and maybe this is more of a general question than one stirred by the arguments in the book: do our endeavours to save free will stem from an unwillingness to accept that we are not an exception of the universe, or from the faith that moral responsibility requires it, or maybe a third one, that we cannot completely explain away our first-person experience of agency yet. I think by now, we are at a point where it is difficult to seriously argue for the first. And if it is the second, it seems rather an inversion of what comes first – and are we really completely unable to find alternative foundations for moral responsibility? Interestingly, a separate study co-authored by Vierkant Responsibility Without Freedom? Folk Judgements About Deliberate Actions tells us that folk intuitions suggest otherwise.[3] This is obviously not enough. But I do suppose, it is possible to associate morality, social conventions, consequences of actions with a contractarian or functional need rather than an essential nature of human – that we are free being. The third one is much trickier to treat. But The Tinkering Mind, contrary to the author’s intention, might offer a perspective against it – our sense of agency, when divided into more basic units, forms a process that loops back into each other, with no clear starting point of an “agentive action”, where freedom can be neatly assigned.
In short, Vierkant draws our attention to a parallel between extended cognition and epistemic agency, arguing that if writing down the numbers is a constitutive part of cognition, shepherding is also a constitutive part of belief acquisition. However, this also brings our attention to the feedback loop between the internal and external processes involved in extended cognition and leads us to consider that belief acquisition and intentional shepherding are, in the same way, integral parts of a cognitive feedback loop. And no freedom comes in neatly in this loop.
[1] Mudrik, L., Arie, I. G., Amir, Y., Shir, Y., Hieronymi, P., Maoz, U., O’Connor, T., Schurger, A., Vargas, M., Vierkant, T., Sinnott-Armstrong, W., & Roskies, A. (2022). Free will without consciousness? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 26(7), 555–566. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.03.005, p.556
[2] Vierkant, T. (2023). The Tinkering Mind: Agency, Cognition, and the Extended Mind. Oxford University Press.
[3] Vierkant, T., Deutschländer, R., Sinnott-Armstrong, W., & Haynes, J.-D. (2019). Responsibility Without Freedom? Folk Judgements About Deliberate Actions. Frontiers in Psychology, 10. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01133
