I present considerations surrounding pre-reflective self-consciousness, arising in work I am conducting on a new physicalist, process-based account of [phenomenal] consciousness. The account is called the meta-causal account because it identifies consciousness with a certain type of arrangement of meta-causation. Meta-causation is causation where a cause or effect is itself an instance of causation. The proposed type of arrangement involves a sort of time-spanning, internal reflexivity of the overall meta-causation. I argue that, as a result of the account, any conscious (...) process has PRSC. Hence, PRSC does not need to be taken as a stipulation or argued for on purely phenomenological grounds or as a necessary support for reflective consciousness. I also show how it is natural to the account that PRSC is not an additional, peripheral, sort of consciousness, but is intrinsic to all consciousness, thereby fitting claims about self-intimation and co-constitution by various authors, and also being amenable to an adverbial account. As part of this, consciousness of an external object is just the form that current self-consciousness takes, the meta-causal constitution of it being inextricably modulated by the causal relationship with the object. The article also discusses how MCA helps explore issues of for-me-ness, transparency of perceptual consciousness, and possible immediacy and non-relationality of self-consciousness. (shrink)

Plausibly, agents act freely iff their actions are responses to reasons. But what sort of relationship between reason and action is required for the action to count as a response? The overwhelmingly dominant answer to this question is modalist. It holds that responses are actions that share a modally robust or secure relationship with the relevant reasons. This thesis offers a new alternative answer. It argues that responses are actions that can be explained by reasons in the right way. This (...) explanationist answer comes apart from the modalist answer. For it holds that actions are responses to reasons if they are explained by those reasons even if they don’t share a modally robust relationship. Explanationism thus offers a novel way of vindicating the intuition that alternative possibilities don’t matter to responding to reasons and (consequently) free agency. The key dialectical position the thesis develops is that both modalism and explanationism constitute attempts to capture he core type of relationship encoded by the notion of a response. Responses to reasons, at core, involve a non-accidental relationship between reason and action. We can either understand non-accidentality as a modal phenomenon – as a modally robust tracking between two facts. Or we can understand non-accidentality as an explanatory phenomenon – as a special explanatory relationship between two facts. According to my rival explanationist proposal, two facts share a non-accidental relationship iff we can give a unified explanation of why both obtain. Unified explanations are explanations of why [p&q] that cannot be decomposed into two (or more) separate independent explanations of p and of q. Consequently, according to explanationism about responding to reasons, actions are responses to reasons iff those reasons offer a rational explanation of the action that cannot be decomposed into separate independent components. (shrink)