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)

Carl Hoeferʼs “freedom from the inside out” is a compatibilist account of freedom that claims that we can have a robust kind of freedom even if the world is deterministic. The key insight is that determinism belongs in tenseless B-series time in the block universe, not in our everyday notions of the world where time is experienced in a tensed way with a past, a present, and a future, where the past is viewed as fixed and the future as open. (...) The block universe is time symmetric, i.e., determination can go in both temporal direction, and no particular part of the block universe is determined or fixed prior to any other part. Therefore,we do not have to think of deterministic logical relations as placing constraints on our actions in advance. Instead, we are free to view our actions as primary explainers that very partially determine both the future and the past. Since our actions are thought to place constraints on the microscopic past, it will be argued that Hoeferʼs account can question the Consequence Argument, the well-known incompatibilist argument that claims that if the past and the laws are not up to us, the consequences of the past and the laws cannot be up to us either, which includes our present actions. Hence, it will be argued that by rejecting that the past is not up to us, Hoeferʼs account can refute the Consequence Argument, which removes one possible threat to our freedom. (shrink)