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The philosophical inquiry into the conditions of freedom of action is divided
over the question of causes of human actions and reasons for actions owned by
the agent. It is argued by the determinist philosophers that even the reasons for
actions, such as our desires and our rational thinking over our desires, is
caused by natural conditions outside consciousness. On the other hand,
conception of ourselves as rational agents, acting on our own, involves the idea
that natural causality is a process of events causing other events, whereas our
actions are not merely events in nature. However, the contention that our free
actions are not like natural events involves the idea that they spring forth from a
self who thinks and acts on certain occasions, even though the actions may
appear as events to an external observer. This, however, requires that somehow
the conditions of free action are different from the way natural events take
place. One of the conditions that seem to differentiate actions from events is that
actions are intentional occurrences. Nevertheless, intentionality of actions is, in
my view, hard to be philosophically corroborated in contrast to the obvious and
over looked aspect of being self-conscious about what we do or intend to do.
Though it is clear and undeniable that most of the time we are conscious of what
we do or intend to do, still the idea of a continuant self-acting divergently
through his choices and decisions is, in my opinion, a necessary condition for
the actions to be called free in contrast to natural events caused by other events.
However difficult it may be to explain this continuant self in the flux of nature,
still I think the very idea is a necessary condition for explaining the various
ways in which thoughts, desires, will, intentions, and actions are related. In
other words, to be a rational agent means to be self-conscious. This paper is an
attempt to bring back the debate of freedom and determinism under the focus of
this notion of self-consciousness. The notion of self-consciousness seems to me
intuitively obvious as a unifying condition of freedom, such that without this our
freedom of action either entails randomness, or we unintentionally end up in
arguing for freedom in a deterministic fashion by trying to explain the mental
behind the physical and vice versa.
Zahoor H. Baber. (2011) SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS: A CONDITION OF FREEDOM, Journal of Social Science and Humanities, Volume 50, Issue 1.
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