[MD] The Quality of Free Will

[david buchanan]

dmb says to Dan:
I'm asking about the notion you've been hammering upon: the notion that it is our behavior that is without choice, and not us. What is the difference between our behavior being without choice and us being without choice. How is that NOT the same thing? The question was, "if our behavior is controlled, how does that fail to count as controlling us?" I didn't recognize anything you said as an answer to that question. How do you figure that what we do and say and think is not us? That's what doesn't make sense, as far as I can tell.


Dan said to dmb:
...Your will is an illusion, an idea. Point to it. Where is it?

dmb addresses that question again, just in case you missed it:


Well, the idea of the will is derived from experience. If this concept is NOT reified or otherwise turned into a metaphysical entity, then the idea simply refers to actual, concrete experiences. As Siegfried puts it, "To call this phenomenal experience of activity a MERE ILLUSION is to prefer a hidden ontological principle, that can never experienced and thus never verified, to an experientially verifiable level of investigation."

As Charlene Siegfried explains it, "The first step in the investigation must be to seek 'the original type and model of what it means' in the stream of experience." She is telling us that concrete experience - as opposed to abstract thought - is the only place to look for the meaning of our activity. To find out what words like freedom and causality mean, the first thing to do is return to the stream of experience to see what they are in the originally felt and lived experience. That is where our concepts and abstractions come from and that's where they are tried and tested. That's what our ideas are about; life as it's lived. 
"William James offers this concrete description of human activity: 'But in this actual world or ours, as it is given, a part at least of activity comes with definite direction; it comes with desire and sense of goal; it comes complicated with resistances which it overcomes or succumbs to, and with the efforts which the feeling of resistance so often provokes; and it is in complex experiences like these that the notions of distinct agents, and of passivity as opposed to activity arise. Here also the notion of causal activity comes to birth." (ERE, 81-2) James points out that our ideas about about causality and freedom are abstractions or generalizations about the 'ultimate Qualiia' of lived experience. These ideas refer to experiences of process, obstruction, striving, strain, or release' and James concludes that we cannot conceive of it as lived through except 'in the dramatic shape of something sustaining a felt purpose against felt obstacles, and overcoming or being overcome'." (Charlene Seigfried in "William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy", page 319.) 

This are not questions about the number of angles that can fit on a pinhead. This is about human life. Big time.

As Charlene says, "...We want to know whether we are responsible for our activities or are determined by events outside of our knowledge and control. The phenomenal level cannot be superseded if we are even to ask the right questions or frame the experiments correctly. The issue is precisely whether events which we experience as ours are in fact so, or whether they should be reductively attributed to brain cells. In returning to the metaphysical question James defends the position that the nature, meaning and location of causality can be determined only at the phenomenal level of concrete experience (Essays in Radical Empiricism, 91). It it thus not a metaphysical question at all, but a concrete one, or one answerable within the parameters of radical empiricism. Not only does he show that the metaphysical question must be dropped as unanswerable on its own terms, but taking activity at its face-value, or as we experience it, we also discover 'the very power that makes facts come and be'. In arguing that facts are interactively constituted by us, he has finally explicitly drawn the consequences of his break with the empiricist assumption that our percepts passively mirror reality as it is in itself." (Charlene Seigfried in "William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy", page 322.)

"To the objection that our felt activity is only an impression and the facts are to be found elsewhere he [James] responds with the principle of the radically empiricist philosophy according to which anything, to be considered real, must be located within experience. If creative activities are to be found anywhere, 'they must be immediately lived' (ERE, 92). 

"To call this phenomenal experience of activity a MERE ILLUSION is to prefer a hidden ontological principle, that can never experienced and thus never verified, to an experientially verifiable level of investigation."