Philosophy 290-1

We’ll review some recent analyses of causation, as found in the current literature, and look at how they apply to mental causation, the ways we ordinarily think about time and our understanding of free will.

Time: Every known human society thinks in terms of a linear time: the time in which one’s own birth and death are located, the time of one’s ancestors, and the time of one’s children and their descendants. Most communities have some story to tell about the origin of their society, and its history. Every known animal species is capable of temporal cognition, often in startlingly complex ways. Animals may have internal stopwatches and be able to compare temporal intervals, as linger or shorter. Animals can estimate and use their temporal locations on circadian and circannual clocks, for example. Yet no other species than humans has clock and calendar time: the linearly organized series of times around which we conceptualize our lives. This raises a puzzle. Since the rest of the animal kingdom manages just fine without linear time, why is it that humans use it? It’s not as if linearly organized times are merely phenomena, like gamma-ray bursts, which humans can recognize even though other species cannot. We put linear time at the center of our moral and practical lives. In many languages, it’s impossible even to report an event without specifying its location in linear time: tense marking is often compulsory. We ask what we are going to do with our lives, and wonder if we are wasting time. But when all other animal species operate without any conception at all of linear time, why is it that we not only use linear time, but give it this central place in our lives? Is there some other difference between humans and other animals, that explains why we think in terms of linear time and they do not?

Free Will: Discussion of free will is usually cast in terms of an ability humans are thought to have to control their actions. The opening sentence of O’Connor and Franklin’s excellent Stanford Encyclopedia article on ‘Free Will’ is: ‘The term “free will” has emerged over the past two millennia as the canonical designator for a significant kind of control over one’s actions’. And it’s usually thought that humans are distinctive among animals in having this kind of control. The more fundamental question, though, is not what kind of control is distinctive of humans, but why humans need to be able to control their actions in a way that other animals do not. The difference between humans and animals, in what kinds of temporal thinking they have a use for, can be traced to this underlying difference in the causal structure of human and animal minds that allows us to think and act freely.

Causation: We’ll look at differences between the causal structure of human psychology and the causal structures of the mental lives of other animals that underpin these differences in free will and temporal thinking. The central questions here have to do with the relationship between generality and causal explanation. Does all causal explanation have to be grounded in generalizations, as most causal theorists have thought? Or is there a special place for the idiosyncratic, the one-off, particularly when we’re giving causal explanations that relate to human psychology?