The Random Consideration Generator

Carl H. Flygt

April 2005

Do not underestimate the power of the microculture that is generated among the cardinals when they are together. The kind of reflections that end up influencing them are completely unpredictable.

-from The New York Times, April 17, 2005

In reality, the mind is love. – Alan Watts, sometime in the 1960s

The lukewarm reception in Berkeley for Daniel Dennett’s random consideration generator puzzles me somewhat. Dennett has given us something substantial to explain free will, an engineering model that fits nicely with everything we know and understand about the mind, about causation and about intentional actions. Dennett’s model contradicts nothing in Searle’s account of free actions in the gap, and is actually more precise, introducing modal notions into the Searlean picture of the free will. When extended, it also specifies the crucial factors of having reasons for a free action, and accounts for the counterfactual sense that other actions could have been taken in place of the one that actually was.

I will not rehearse here the range of virtues of Dennett’s idea - that it allows selective intelligence to make a difference in free actions, that it gives moral education a sense and a significance, that it appears able to account for the fact that thought impulses are somewhat discontinuous and unpredictable, etc. – but will focus on the shortcoming the Berkeley seminar seemed to identify. Dennett describes no mechanism to override the output of the generator. Once a decision has been selected from the generator’s output at time t1, what prevents another series of considerations from pushing into consciousness at time t2? Why aren’t free decisions a kind of random walk as one decision, then another and then yet another each temporarily hold sway?

The answer here is that something in us doesn’t want to give attention to the generator’s output once a decision is made. A certain will takes over. Dennett actually recognizes this, pointing out that the generator is typically active in moments of lazy mulling, rather than in periods of intensive concentration. Put the other way around, something in us becomes sympathetic with one of the representations the generator produces. If we make a decision, at some level we like that decision. We judge it to be ok, the best of all possibilities. In short, we universalize it. This sympathetic will is what Searle analyzes as the causal self-reference of the intention in action. The intention in action has conditions of satisfaction that this very intention causes, say, consideration c4 to represent my decision. Causal self-reference is the sympathetic will, and it is sufficient to override the output of the generator.

No wonder we have the feeling of a free will! The free will is doubly determined. At one stage in the neurological cascade, its content devolves from a random generator, and is thereby subject to no causal pattern. It appears to come from out of nowhere. At another, more important stage, this content is something with which we become necessarily sympathetic, and thereby is something we automatically accept. Both this condition of a content’s being sympathetic to us and our automatic acceptance of it is intrinsic to its formal universality. Also intrinsic to this universality are our momentary sense of selfhood and our sense of freedom. This universal content is something that to us in the moment seems objectively valid, correct or otherwise right, all things considered. It is the value or moral imperative we see in the action. It is our reason for doing what we do.

Having a reason to do something and doing something else instead is having a better reason to do that something else. Dennett is very good here. I would have fulfilled the counterfactual condition if the generator had produced it, but most often it produces that consideration after the fact. By and large the sense of having had counterfactual alternatives open to me is illusory, a chimera of hindsight. The counterfactual standard for freedom is no good. Freedom is what we do confronted with alternatives, one of which, all things considered, we decide we can afford to love. Freedom is actually, deep down, nothing more and nothing less than love working its way through the cosmos in us.

The connection between the universalizability, or the selective preferability, of one token of the generator’s output and the evaluative attitude we adopt on its behalf links the world of nature in us to the world of reason we exemplify. Because for logical reasons one and only one token of output can function as the best of all possibilities, that token enters the stream of one’s decision-making with the force of necessity. That necessary force is causally efficient in a bottom-up sense, producing on the one hand one’s sense of oneself in that moment qua decision-maker, and producing at the same time the cascade of neuronal associations that culminate in the bodily movement or in the state that satisfies the intention in action. From this analysis of selective processes devolving into universal judgments, one can see the interplay between the free spiritual nature, which dwells in self-conscious reason, and the world of natural law, which is entirely a matter of causally determined processes.

The motive power of having a reason for an action, its logical/causal necessity, will probably prove to be a question of biological specificity. For example, in the right medium, the pyruvate kinase molecule both can and must bind ATP and break its high energy bond, thus releasing its energy. This bottom-up causal necessity is a result of the kinase molecule’s configuration in space, and of the complementary configuration of the ATP molecule, likewise in space. There is probably a similar complementarity in the brain between its representation of a reason to act and the self-referential brain state Searle calls the intention-in-action, and which we may equally call the sympathetic will.

The concept of biological specificity appears able to explain also another type of universalization. Not only is an enzyme able to recognize all token molecules of a certain type, and to operate on them, but it is also able to eliminate as irrelevant all other types of molecule in the soup, of which in a cell there may be tens of thousands. A structure with biological specificity is able to universalize negatively as well as positively. On the face of it, our value judgments appear to be universalizations of this type as well. When we decide we like something, not only do we prefer it to everything else that is relevantly like it, but we also class as irrelevant everything else that could conceivably have been relevant but given our purposes and background is not. The cardinals undoubtedly gave no thought whatsoever to considering John Kerry, and everyone like him, as the next Pope.

Much more about these cosmic and essentially spatial mechanisms, if the right neurobiological data exists, could be discussed. For example, is the random generator truly random, or does it just appear to be so? Does it have intentionality or not? If evaluative judgments have the power to cause action, what sort of singularity could take place in the brain, causing both a motor output and a proprioceptive self-sense? But such questions, interesting and important as they may be, are to my mind less compelling than the overall contextual and political questions that can be asked about what we should do with our new self-understanding, once it emerges from the new logic and from brain science. And my answer there, of course, is that all these questions and more can be discussed most effectively in the context of pure conversation, where our singular cosmic psychobiological states occupy front and center stage.