UC Irvine

This work concerns effort: what it is, how we as conscious agents relate to it, and how we use it to control our actions and beliefs. This paper consists of five chapters.In chapter 1, I advance the claim that our phenomenal consciousness’s experiences frequently involve an ‘ego,’ a self. Unlike other competing views, I argue that this ego exists and refers to the overall phenomenal consciousness.In chapter 2, I argue that putting in effort is a primitive and phenomenally conscious act that the conscious self does. This view, I argue, compares favorably to the other extant views on effort. This is mainly because the other views do not properly respect the fact that effort is both experienced and performed. My view, on the other hand, in being an act of the conscious self, will be able to do both.In chapter 3, I argue that agents have a free undetermined power to cause basic actions to resolve difficult decisions in their lives. To support this, I attempt to show how such agent causation can coexist peaceably with deterministic natural-law causation. Key here is metaphysical indeterminacy: the idea that how things are does not settle whether certain propositional matters are true or false. I propose that agents have the power to reduce the metaphysical indeterminacy around our actions, thereby making determinate which of many possible deterministic causal futures are true.In chapter 4, I apply some of the results from chapter 3 to the conscious self. I argue that the conscious self is a substance, that it can resolve torn decisions using effort-acts, and that it can use those effort-acts to control some non-basic actions, habits, and skills. Taken together with the materials from chapter 3, the result is a comprehensive view of the conscious self, its power to put in effort, and how it can use that power to control actions.Finally, in chapter 5, I expand effortful control to committed beliefs: beliefs we commit to through reflection and conscious reasoning. To do this, I first show how conscious reasoning is phenomenally conscious and controllable through effort. Then, I show how conscious reasoning plays a central role in how we form and come to know our committed beliefs. Last, I explain how the limitations of conscious reasoning require us to maintain committed beliefs in a system. We then use reflection—initiated and sustained through effort—to maintain that system, adding, removing, and altering committed beliefs as needed.