[MD] Dennett & James' "Free will"

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Steve:
Dude,.. you brought the issue [the Jamesian two-stage model of free will] to the table when you starting quoting from James essay, "The Dilemma of Determinism".



Steve replied:
I didn't bring in any two-stage model. That was Boyle's idea that you brought in. I brought the James essay in to show you ...


dmb says:
Oh. My. God. You're so lost that you don't even understand your own evidence. The man's name is Doyle, not Boyle, and his lecture at Harvard is an explanation of the the James essay you brought to the table. That is the essay where James presents his two-stage model. Your denials only show how clueless you are about your own words and deeds. 

Steve said to dmb:
You keep saying that I ignored your long series of quotes which you presented without explanation of what you think they mean or how they relate to the discussion. I have no idea what you want me to say about them.   The issue for me is that you are slipping the traditional notion of free will in the backdoor of the MOQ. ...


dmb says:
You don't see how the Seigfried quotes relate? They show that Jamesian free will is a practical and empirical matter, that it doesn't depend on any metaphysical claim. Drop the traditional metaphysical baggage, you keep you saying. And so I'm showing you that there isn't any. The only metaphysical baggage here is yours. I guess you can't handle the textual evidence. Apparently, it's beyond your capabilities. But why should that surprise me, right? I mean, if you can't even grasp the meaning of your own evidence why should I expect you to understand mine.

Steve said:
Pirsigian compatiblism which I think is best understood in terms of small self (determinism)/Big Self (freedom) rather than "first chance, then choice" or "first free, then will." Pirsig's notion of freedom is not a matter of the will of a free agent. While the model Boyle is peddling may be an interesting and helpful model for understanding James, I don't see this view anywhere in Pirsig's writing.



dmb says:

James kept working and thinking after he wrote that essay with the two-stage model. That's the advantage of listening to Seigfreid. She has the whole of James's work under her belt. This fuller view of James is more compatible with Pirsig, but now that I think about it the two-stage model isn't a bad way to think about Pirsig's reformulation. We could say that the extent to which we are NOT controlled by static patterns is the extent to which we are indetermined (first free). And the extent to which we follow DQ is the extent to which we can exercise choices or act on our preferences. The problem with relying on James's essay is that he had not yet made his explicit break with the Cartesian self. He expressed a lot of doubt about it in his psychology text, saying, for example, that the self was better conceived as a stream of consciousness rather than an entity or a thing. But his knockout punch against the Cartesian self didn't happen until 1905 when he published the essay titled "Does Consciousness Exist?". That's when radical empiricism was born, in a period that James scholars call an explosion of creativity.