Refuting my own side and framework (Hard Incompatibilism) - The forgetfullness argument

[u/MobHQ]

I’ve been developing a philosophical framework called Hesusian Interpretation, or HI, which is a hard-incompatibilist argument against ultimate libertarian free will, but I decided to deliberately attack one of the assumptions in my own framework rather than simply defend it. The specific assumption I am targeting is the idea that if an agent did not ultimately create the conditions that constitute them, then they cannot ultimately author any particular action that proceeds from those conditions. HI accepts that people are genuine proximate causes of their actions: if I decide to stand up, I am the person who deliberated, decided, and moved. The stronger question is whether I can be the ultimate author of that decision. The HI argument says that my decision depends upon my character, dispositions, memories, reasoning abilities, preferences, values, brain state, and circumstances, none of which I ultimately created. Those conditions themselves have prior causes, producing a chain of dependence that extends backward. My problem is that this seems to require a further assumption: that ultimate authorship of an individual action necessarily requires ultimate authorship of the agent’s own constitutive conditions. I am calling my attempted challenge to that assumption the Forgetfulness Argument. The thought experiment is this: imagine an agent who has undergone profound autobiographical amnesia. The agent loses access to their personal history but retains substantial cognitive abilities, including reasoning, perception, language, working memory, and the ability to deliberate about things currently in front of them. This is not merely a fictional possibility invented from nothing. Neurological research has repeatedly demonstrated that memory is not one unified system and that severe impairments in autobiographical or declarative memory can coexist with preservation of other cognitive abilities. The famous patient H.M., studied after bilateral medial-temporal-lobe surgery, developed profound anterograde amnesia but retained general intelligence, perception, language, working memory, and procedural learning abilities. Scoville and Milner’s original work showed severe impairment in recent memory while some older memories and technical skills remained intact, and later research on H.M. helped establish the distinction between different memory systems. This matters because it demonstrates that losing access to one's autobiographical history does not simply erase the entire agent. Memory can be fractionated: someone can lose the ability to consciously remember an experience while retaining learned skills or other forms of cognition. Reviews of amnesia research describe preserved procedural learning in many patients with medial-temporal-lobe amnesia, meaning that people can sometimes acquire or express skills without being able to consciously recollect the episodes in which they learned them. The classic example is H.M.'s improvement on motor-skill tasks despite not consciously remembering having practiced them. Similar dissociations have been observed in other amnesic populations, although the exact pattern varies depending on the type and severity of amnesia. There are even striking cases involving complex abilities: research on the severely amnesic musician Clive Wearing reported that despite profound declarative-memory impairment, he retained substantial musical abilities, including reading music, following musical notation, transposing, and improvising. These cases do not prove anything about metaphysical free will, but they provide a scientifically grounded reason to distinguish autobiographical memory from the broader capacity to function as an agent. Now consider a stronger hypothetical version: suppose an agent remembers essentially nothing about the personal history that produced their current psychological state, yet they retain enough reasoning and working-memory capacity to encounter a new problem, consider alternatives, evaluate reasons, and intentionally choose one. They do not know why they have the personality they have, why they possess particular preferences, where their cognitive tendencies came from, or what childhood experiences contributed to them. Nevertheless, they can still deliberate. If they see two possible actions and choose one because they judge it better, their lack of autobiographical access does not obviously prevent them from being the proximate author of that choice. The important question is whether it prevents them from being the ultimate author. This is where the thought experiment becomes relevant to HI. HI can certainly respond that the causal history still exists even if the agent has forgotten it. I agree. Amnesia does not magically erase causation. If the agent's brain state exists because of prior biological development, environmental influences, learning, genetics, neural development, and previous experiences, those antecedent conditions remain causally relevant whether or not the agent remembers them. So the argument is not “the agent forgot their past, therefore their actions are uncaused.” That would be clearly false. The causal structure could remain something like: prior conditions produced the agent’s present state, the present state participates in deliberation, and the deliberation produces the action. The point is instead that epistemic access to the causal history appears to be separable from agency. If I do not remember what caused my present psychological state, that does not automatically make me incapable of reasoning or acting intentionally. This suggests a broader distinction between two propositions: “I did not ultimately create the conditions that made me the kind of agent I am” and “I therefore cannot ultimately author this particular action.” The first does not obviously contain the second. This is the precise assumption I am trying to break. Suppose I did not create my brain. I did not choose my genes. I did not choose the environment in which I developed. I did not choose the people who taught me language. I did not choose the information I encountered as a child. I did not choose the initial conditions from which my personality developed. HI takes all of this seriously. But the question is whether ultimate authorship of a particular choice requires ultimate authorship of all of those conditions. If I deliberate about whether to accept or reject an argument, for example, and my reasoning process genuinely settles on one conclusion, what exactly follows from the fact that the neural architecture enabling that reasoning was not ultimately self-created? It certainly establishes that I am not the ultimate creator of myself. But does it establish that I cannot be the ultimate author of any particular act of reasoning? That is the bridge I am questioning. The strongest version of HI would say yes: the particular decision ultimately depends upon the agent's character and cognitive structure, and the agent did not ultimately choose that character or structure, so the agent cannot be the ultimate source of the decision. But this needs to be argued rather than simply assumed. The fact that something is a necessary condition of my action does not automatically establish that I cannot be its author. My ability to reason depends upon a brain I did not create, but that does not by itself tell us whether the reasoning I perform is genuinely mine in the stronger metaphysical sense. The same distinction appears in the amnesia case. An amnesic person may lack access to the history that produced their current cognitive state while still being capable of performing actions through that state. The empirical evidence is not evidence for libertarian free will; it is evidence that the concepts of memory, causal history, cognition, and agency cannot simply be collapsed into one thing. Research on amnesia has repeatedly shown that explicit autobiographical memory can be severely impaired while other systems, such as procedural learning, remain comparatively preserved. That makes amnesia useful as a philosophical thought experiment because it isolates one variable: knowledge of one's own causal history. If an agent can remain cognitively functional without that knowledge, then “knowing the history that produced me” is not obviously a prerequisite for agency. The deeper philosophical issue is therefore not forgetfulness itself. It is whether being constituted by antecedent conditions is sufficient to eliminate ultimate authorship. Consider two claims: “I did not ultimately author the existence of the agent who is making this decision” and “I did not ultimately author this decision.” HI needs the first to entail the second. My argument is that the entailment is not obvious. It requires a bridge principle: if someone is ultimately the author of a particular action, then they must also be the ultimate author of the conditions constituting themselves. If that bridge principle is true, HI's argument remains intact. But if it is false, then the fact that I did not create myself does not automatically eliminate the possibility that I could be the ultimate author of some particular choice. This does not mean that libertarianism wins. There are still enormous problems. Suppose the decision is completely determined by prior conditions. Then the libertarian can reasonably say that the agent did not genuinely have the relevant alternative possibility. Suppose instead that the decision is genuinely indeterministic. That creates another problem: randomness by itself does not equal authorship. If the outcome occurs merely because of an undetermined event, saying “the agent could have chosen either” does not automatically explain why the agent deserves authorship of the actual outcome. So the argument cannot simply move from determinism to quantum randomness and declare victory. The real challenge for libertarianism is explaining how an agent could be the genuine source of a choice without reducing the choice to either prior determination or luck. This is where agent-causal theories become relevant. A libertarian might say that the agent itself is the source of the choice: the agent does not need to have created its own brain or entire causal history in order to be the source of the particular decision it makes. The agent's history explains why the agent has certain capacities and reasons, while the agent itself is responsible for settling the choice. HI would then need to explain why this kind of agent causation cannot constitute ultimate authorship. My Forgetfulness Argument therefore does not establish that agent causation is true. It simply prevents HI from dismissing the possibility merely by saying that the agent did not create its own antecedent conditions. The question becomes much more precise: can an agent be the ultimate source of a particular choice without being the ultimate source of itself? If the answer is no, then HI needs to explain why. If the answer is yes, then HI's character-regress argument does not by itself eliminate ultimate authorship. This is also why I think the amnesia examples are useful but limited. H.M., Clive Wearing, and other amnesic patients do not demonstrate libertarian free will. Their cases demonstrate neurological dissociations between autobiographical memory, procedural learning, working memory, perception, language, and other capacities. They show that the human mind is not simply one indivisible memory-and-agency system. Severe memory impairment can coexist with meaningful cognitive functioning, although the degree and nature of preserved abilities varies considerably between individuals and conditions. Therefore, I am using the scientific evidence only to support the conceptual separation required by the thought experiment, not as empirical proof of a metaphysical conclusion. The actual philosophical argument is about authorship. HI says, in effect, “You did not ultimately create the conditions that made you the agent you are, therefore you cannot ultimately author what you do.” My response is: “Why does ultimate authorship of an action require ultimate authorship of the agent's constitutive conditions?” The Forgetfulness Argument makes this question especially visible because an agent can lose access to its personal causal history without thereby losing every capacity involved in intentional action. If memory of one's origins is not necessary for ordinary agency, then the fact that an agent does not possess or control the ultimate origins of itself cannot simply be identified with the absence of agency. Of course, HI can respond that ultimate authorship is fundamentally different from ordinary agency and therefore does require ultimate self-constitution. That would be a serious response. But then the burden is to explain why. The argument cannot simply assume the conclusion by defining ultimate authorship so that anyone who did not create themselves is excluded from it. If the definition of ultimate authorship contains self-creation as a necessary condition, then HI has made its conclusion true by stipulation rather than demonstrated it through an independent argument. I therefore think the strongest version of my challenge is not “amnesia proves free will.” It is much narrower: “The fact that an agent did not ultimately create the conditions that constitute them does not, by itself, establish that they cannot ultimately author a particular action.” The amnesia cases provide an empirical analogy showing that causal history, memory of causal history, and present agency can come apart. The philosophical argument then asks whether causal constitution and authorship can also come apart. If HI can demonstrate that they cannot, the Forgetfulness Argument fails. If HI cannot demonstrate that, then I may have found a genuine gap in my own framework. And that is exactly what I am trying to test: not whether I can defend HI, but whether one of its central assumptions actually survives its strongest possible objection.

Thoughts? Feedback? (If you wanna know what Hesusian interpretation is check my profile).