[MD] Free Will

[david buchanan]

Steve said to Craig:
What is interesting to me is that though we tend to feel like our conscious self is the author of our thoughts, when we mediate--when we make our best effort to be conscious and pay attention to our own thoughts--we notice that that feeling of willing our thoughts is nowhere to be found. This is what Harris means when he says that the illusion of free will is itself an illusion. When we really pay attention, even the feeling of free will just isn't there.

dmb says:
I can't make any sense of that. Isn't it true that "making our best effort to be conscious and pay attention" would be a classic example of the will? In that case, we'd have to use the very thing in question in order to discover its absence? 
And what do you (or rather Harris) mean when you say the illusion is itself and illusion. Is that a double negative so that there is no illusion after all, or what? I really don't get your meaning. 
Also, with "the author of our thoughts" you're framing the question with that extra self again, as if there was a thinker above and beyond the thinking and the thoughts. This is further complicated by "that feeling of willing our thoughts" and "the feeling of free will". In both cases, I wonder what "feelings" you mean. 
And framing it as something to be investigated by way of meditation seems more than a little bit strange because that's just not the place to look for the will. As I understand it, deliberately directing your attention on thoughts is more properly called reflection or contemplation whereas meditation is a practice designed to quiet the mind, to stop thinking, which is much, much harder than thinking reflectively. But it also seems to me that thinking and willing is small self, static quality stuff. (At this point, sadly, I should pre-emptively deny that this small self is a god or a soul or some ultimate arbitrator and reiterate the fact that I'm talking about the self as a complex forest of conflicting values and the will as the capacity of evolved living being to negotiate the balance between them, plus an ability to respond to DQ in novel ways.) Now, when we go looking for the will as the capacity to resist some values in favor of others we want to look at that static realm, not the meditative state. If you're successful, that practice is going to lead you to the Big Self, but thoughts and wills and egos are useful conventions and that is the only fair basis on which they can be evaluated. I mean, we are talking about practical, conventional, humanly constructed stuff. That's where it makes sense, gets used, has pragmatic value, etc.. 
Like I asked you a couple of weeks ago (and you gave no real answer), if ordinary people express their will every day, then in what sense is it not real? Why can't this issue be asked and answered on broadly empirical grounds? If freedom and constraint are both known in experience, on what basis do we say one side or the other is an illusion? Why does the will have to be either a metaphysical god or a double, double illusion squared?
Why can't we use the term "will" to refer to this common occurrence in everyday life? I mean, as a practical matter we can't even get out of bed in the morning unless we decide, on some level, that getting up is better than not. Sometimes we even decide to get up even though there is part of us that doesn't want to. We'd like to sleep some more AND we'd also like to get where we're going on time. This little dilemma is one of a million examples of what it means for a living being to negotiate between rival values, to balance our preferences. In the exercise of this will, there is neither total freedom nor total restraint.
When we really pay attention to ordinary empirical reality, the will isn't very mysterious at all. The hunger strike and the whole global ascetic tradition spring to mind, as well as all the social level moral codes that are supposed to help us restrain biological quality. One could even say that human culture itself is an expression of the will, a relatively successful exertion of control over ourselves collectively. Science could fairly realistically be described as being more deliberately in the business of prediction and control.
The whole process of human development could safely be characterized as an expanding capacity to preform this balancing act, and it seems we roughly follow the history of evolution in this developmental expansion. Just as the snake sheds its skin, so we outgrow our former selves when the existing constraints just aren't big enough anymore. As Matt pointed out, the basic stages can be easily identified as me, we and I. The me has no will as I understand the term. The me is pure id, just instincts and urges without restraint of conscience or forethought. The we is superego, the social level imposing "Vice" laws and all that, as I mentioned already. The I only follows from the social self, even as a psychological, developmental matter. Individuality is born out of an effort to negotiate between the various demands of the social games we have to play. As society gets increasingly complex, we are asked to play a greater variety of roles and in wearing all these masks, if you will, we are more or less forced to invent an identity. We tell ourselves stories about who we "really" are and the stories aren't true, exactly, but this is what gives rise to individuality all the same. You can see this most obviously in teenagers, who are forever experimenting with who they want to be. There really is a range of options, you know? It's all superficial and awkward and fake, at first but most everybody settles into some acceptable option.
Hopefully this kind of growth doesn't get arrested by putting on business suit or a uniform and we continue to identify with larger and larger perspectives. Getting beyond your own ego and having compassion for all living beings and other so-called "spiritual" insights are just much further along on this same continuum, I think. Becoming an I is just the beginning of adult development, or at least it should be. 
And the will is a lot like that. It grows out of the tensions created by the previous stages of development. I mean, if there are no rival levels of value, there is no need for the capacity to negotiate between them. If there were no id and superego, there would be no need for the ego, which is the capacity to negotiate between those conflicting demands. Freud had a different vocabulary and he had very different aims but the basic idea is the same. Lots of people have come to this hierarchical, evolutionary picture of human development and the MOQ's levels map onto it quite nicely. There are many disputes about the details, of course, but that just adds to the fun. 

It was fun getting carried away and so I didn't stop myself, even though I'm hungry and my boss said he'd fire me if I was late again.