• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), who is here a key proponent of soft determinism (“compatibilism”), the notion that agentially derived freedom occurs within the nature of causality
• Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), who is here a key proponent of hard determinism, the notion that actions are necessarily preceded and brought about through prior cause
• René Descartes (1596-1650), who is here a key proponent of libertarianism, a notion that there are free agents and alternative possibilities (lack of a telos)

The Free Will Debate, in Greater Detail

Hard Determinism: Actions are Determined By Prior Causes

• All events, including human actions, are determined by prior causes and conditions.
• When following the chain of causality, only one outcome can therefore be possible.
• Thus, genuine free will can not exist if every action is preceded and determined by a prior cause.
• The feeling of freedom may seem real, but it is metaphysically illusory.

Libertarianism: Free Agents and Alternative Possibilities

• Human beings may act freely as agents capable of affecting the world.
• Therefore, at least some choices are not fully necessitated by prior causes.
• Free will is incompatible with determinism.
• Thus, agents can genuinely do otherwise.

Soft Determinism (Compatibilism): Freedom From Within Causation

• Free will and determinism are compatible.
• Compatibilism defines freedom differently from libertarianism.
• Free will does not require being without cause; it requires acting from one’s own will.
• An agent may act freely when an action follows from their own reason, desire, and deliberation, rather than external coercion.

Consciousness According to Early Modern Philosophers

The premise of consciousness is important in the free will debate because it naturally reveals how humans are able to make decisions.

The Cartesian Conception of Perception and Sensation

Descartes maintains that the nature of experience is internal to the subject; that is, it is derived from subjective thought. Thus, experiences become treated as a sequence of inner states rather than a product of engagement with the external world (Lagerspetz, 2002). If consciousness is an inward thinking substance as it is here, it is much easier to conceive of it as a genuine causal agent.

The Spinozan View of the Mind as the Idea of a Human Body

Spinoza holds that without the mind, there can be no body, and without the body, there can be no mind; that is, they are causally related and inhered in the other. As the human mind is found in the Spinozan attribute of Thought, there exists an according body in the attribute of Extension (Petrufová Joppová, 2002). Thus, it can be said that mind is already embedded within nature, thereby hinting at a mechanistic attitude.

Leibniz’s Account of Phenomenal Consciousness

Leibniz, meanwhile, describes an account of phenomenal consciousness that is grounded in perception, sensation, and attention. In doing so, there is seen a first-order account of consciousness; that is, it is not processed through another mental state. As attention is rather modulated through an awareness of sensation as performed by the mind as an agent (Barth, 2014), Leibniz presents as somewhat of a bridge between brute mechanism and strong libertarian free will.

The Science of the Brain: A Mechanistic View of Consciousness

With the rise of neuroscience, consciousness becomes increasingly difficult to preserve as something wholly independent from the physical processes of the brain, as thought, intention, perception, and even the apparent act of choosing are now observed as being deeply implicated in neural activity. Accordingly, the older image of mind as an immaterial and self-moving principle becomes pressured by an account in which cognition is bound up in bodily mechanism, and, more specifically, in the electrochemical and structural features of the brain itself (Tancredi, 2007). In this way, the science of the brain does not merely comment upon consciousness from without, but rather attempts to situate it within a causal and material order, thereby lending itself more readily to deterministic or compatibilist readings of agency than to a strong libertarian account of a freely originating will.

The Presence of an Immaterial Mind

The major point of contention here is whether there remains sufficient reason to posit an immaterial mind at all, particularly one capable of acting upon matter independently of antecedent causal conditions. Recent naturalized approaches to the free will debate argue that there is little support for such a mind as a separate governor over bodily events, as neurobiological and biophysical findings instead suggest that what is called thought is not exempt from the causal structure of nature (Vervoort & Blusiewicz. 2020). Yet this does not straightforwardly eliminate the question of agency, as it instead forces the debate into a narrower domain: whether conscious control is itself a natural process, rather than something supernatural or metaphysically detached from the body. Thus, the immaterial mind is not simply disproven, but rendered increasingly difficult to maintain as an explanatory necessity.

The Cartesian Res Cogitans as a Causal Agent

Descartes, in distinguishing res cogitans from res extensa, preserves perhaps the strongest early modern account of the mind as a true causal principle, one not reducible to bodily process and therefore able to function as something more than a passive recipient of prior physical causes. If thought is a distinct substance, then it becomes far easier to understand the will as genuinely active, and, more specifically, as capable of directing the body rather than merely being produced by it. Accordingly, the Cartesian framework is especially hospitable to libertarian intuitions concerning free will, as it allows the conscious subject to appear as a real source of action (Lavazza, 2019).

Yet it is precisely within this claim that the old Cartesian difficulty arises; if mind and body are indeed distinct in substance, then the mechanism by which thought moves extension becomes obscure, and the apparent explanatory advantage of the theory begins to dissolve into the problem of psychophysical interaction itself.

The Mind-Body Problem: Direction of Causality

The mind-body problem, as it appears in this context, is fundamentally a question of causal direction: does consciousness act upon the body, or is consciousness itself produced by bodily and neural states? If the former is true, then the mind must possess some genuine ontological independence from the brain, thereby preserving a stronger notion of agency; if the latter is true, then what appears as willing may instead be an effect of prior physical events whose emergence into awareness is only subsequent to their neural initiation. In this way, the debate over free will is inseparable from the question of whether the conscious subject is originative or derivative. What modern neuroscience increasingly suggests is not merely that bodily process accompanies thought, but that what is called thought may itself be inseparable from, or even constituted by, such process, thereby shifting the burden away from an interactive dualism and toward a naturalized account of mind.

If thoughts appear to bring about affective states in the subject of experience, and if such affective states are correlated with specific neural states through neurotransmitters or electrical stimulation, then how can it be known that the neural state did not first produce the thought itself, which only then appeared as the cause of the shift in mood? Are thoughts wholly biological in nature, predicated purely upon neural states?

Phenomenological Perspectives

Despite the mechanistic pressure exerted by neuroscience, there remains the irreducible appearance of consciousness as lived, immediate, and directed toward a world. From the first-person standpoint, one does not experience oneself as a sequence of neural firings, but as a being that perceives, deliberates, reacts, and, in some sense, moves within and against its environment. Thus, phenomenological accounts are important not because they necessarily overturn mechanistic explanation, but because they preserve the fact that agency is experienced as belonging to the subject in its engagement with reality. In this sense, the phenomenological perspective resists the reduction of consciousness to a merely internal and isolated state, instead emphasizing that mind is always already implicated in a surrounding world. Nevertheless, the presence of such experience does not in itself demonstrate metaphysical independence from bodily causation, but only that any sufficient theory of mind must still account for the lived structure of choice as it appears to the self.

Conclusion: A Deterministic Reading of Causal Agency

When taken together, these positions suggest that the question of free will cannot be separated from the deeper question of what consciousness is and how it stands in relation to the body. Descartes preserves the image of mind as an inward and causally active substance, Spinoza embeds mind within a monistic and necessary natural order, and Leibniz presents consciousness as a graded and perceptual phenomenon structured by attention and sensation. Yet it is the modern science of the brain that places the greatest pressure upon the Cartesian model, for it increasingly situates thought, intention, and action within bodily mechanism rather than beyond it. Though phenomenology preserves the lived and subjective sense of agency, and though cognitive science has not conclusively shown that all free will is reducible to epiphenomenal illusion, the general force of the evidence more readily supports a deterministic or compatibilist understanding of causal agency than a robust libertarian one. Thus, the will may still be spoken of, but less as an uncaused origin and more as a naturalized function of conscious deliberation emerging within the causal order of the brain itself.

References

• Barth, C. (2014). Leibniz on Phenomenal Consciousness. Vivarium, 52(3–4), 333–357. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685349-12341280
• Lagerspetz, O. (2002). Experience and consciousness in the shadow of Descartes. Philosophical Psychology, 15(1), 5–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515080120109388
• Lavazza, A. (2019). Why Cognitive Sciences Do Not Prove That Free Will Is an Epiphenomenon. * Frontiers in Psychology, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00326
• Tancredi, L. R. (2007). The neuroscience of “free will”. Behavioral Sciences &Amp; the Law, 25(2), 295–308. https://doi.org/10.1002/bsl.749
• Vervoort, L., & Blusiewicz, T. (2020). Free will and (in)determinism in the brain: a case for naturalized philosophy. THEORIA. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science, 35(3), 345–364. https://doi.org/10.1387/theoria.21302

Luke Duncan

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