Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

dealing with agency. Science, and especially physics, sees all processes in the universe as potentially reversible — there is no arrow of time. But when we come to consciousness and agency, there is clearly an arrow. When we act to make a change in the world it is impossible to undo the change. So there is something very different about causes brought about by agents and the necessary causes we examined above. We don’t really need to invoke Descartes argument about identity hinging on duration to be certain of this, but the idea of identity being sustained over time is helpful nonetheless. (The alternative is that we are deluded about this continuity of identity and to believe that we are — in effect — a new person from moment to moment. Descartes took up this question and decided that God must sustain us in our identity from moment to moment. But we do not need to accept his solution to believe that our sense of identity and continuity is fundamental to functioning in the world.)

Along similar lines, Alfred North Whitehead offered us a time-based theory of mind. Mind, for him, is the future ‘pole’ of the ‘wave-function’ — matter is the past. So, making a decision takes things from consciousness into matter. The mind (as a ‘settler of matters’) has anticipated and brought things into the present, and then the past, as a process. We noted also, in Chapter 15, the ‘Eleatic dictum’ from Plato, which suggests that, for a thing to exist, it must have causal powers. And, also in Chapter 15, we noted that Henri Bergson’s notion of durée might almost describe time’s progression as the changes made by agents in the world.

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