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If nonconscious brain processes contribute to decision making, what difference , if any, should that make to our traditional conception of what it is to be in control and to be a responsible agent? This is the question that motivates our exploration below. First, a preliminary clarification. “Free will” is an expression festooned with semantic bear traps. We prefer to avoid those. One assumption that frequently ensnares the unwary is that actions can be sorted into one or the other of two separate bins: freely chosen or not. In fact, however, actual decision making is far messier. Sometimes a person is very sleepy or very hungry or chronically stressed or desperately frightened (Arnsten, 2009). Sometimes a person may suffer brain damage. The neat two-bin model is utterly inadequate to the reality of decision making. Another hobbling assumption is that free will implies a freedom from all causal antecedents to the decision. No one can seriously maintain free will in this sense. Denying free will for such “must-beuncaused ” reasons sounds like you are denying what we all know to be a fact: Many people act in a controlled manner much of their lives.1 Semantic bear traps galore. The capacity for self-control, as is evident from research in psychology and neuroscience, is linked to certain causal antecedents and the functioning of specific neuronal structures and pathways. Moreover, self-control comes in degrees. It develops as the infant matures and can decline as dementia destroys. Self-control can be affected by factors such as stress, hunger, cold, and exhaustion. Without belaboring the point, we find that these considerations motivate a shift from the language of free will to the language of control.2 Wrangling over the metaphysical esoterica of free will is apt to be unproductive, and in any case the metaphysical matters have been well discussed elsewhere (Churchland, 2002; Flanagan, 2003; Dennett, 2004). Control we provisionally define as the capacity of an individual to act in an intelligent and adaptive manner within a particular environment—to 8 Agency and Control: The Subcortical Role in Good Decisions Patricia S. Churchland and Christopher L. Suhler 310 Patricia S. Churchland and Christopher L. Suhler maintain a goal, to defer gratification, and to suppress disadvantageous impulses. Control is crucial to matters in the legal domain, as well as to debates in philosophy concerning responsibility. It is also important to a more general set of assumptions regarding how to think about oneself. Because control cannot at this point be precisely defined, it is also useful to amplify the provisional definition by noting the prototypical cases where there is agreement about application of the term (Johnson, 1993). In the prototypical case of controlled action (agency), a healthy adult human who is awake and cognitively unimpaired is said to be an agent when he walks into a bakery and buys a loaf of bread. His action is under his control. By contrast, a man who is sleepwalking and kicks his wife is considered not fully in control. A person who is a chronic nicotine addict has less than full control over his choice to buy a package of cigarettes though he is still held responsible for that action. A person who emits a startle response to a loud and unexpected noise, kicking over a lantern and thereby setting the barn on fire, has compromised control, and he is not held responsible. The prototypes are where agreement is maximal. The difficult cases arise when the person is not yet mature, is not fully awake, is ignorant on some crucial point, or is suffering from brain damage, addiction , or a psychiatric condition. Sometimes there may be no right answer as to whether a person was in control of his or her actions, though in a legal context a definite answer may be required nonetheless. Control, as with many other concepts, has a radial structure with declining degrees of similarity from the central cases to those in the fuzzy boundary.3 Recently, however, a growing body of research on the prevalence of nonconscious cognition and the influence of nonconscious factors on behavior has been taken to imply that even the prototypical cases of agency are not what they seem (Wilson, 2002). How can a person have any control at all over nonconscious factors? How can such factors enter into a person’s conscious deliberations and reflections? How can they be part of a person’s weighing of reason and evidence? And if you cannot have control over nonconscious factors...

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