Today I wondered what William James had to say in "The Principles of
Psychology" about free will. Are there parts about free will? Volume 2 has a
Chapter XXVI
"WILL"...https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin26.htm...where
William says "The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most
'voluntary,' is to ATTEND to a difficult object and hold it fast before the
mind"He continues "though the spontaneous drift of thought is all the other
way, the attention must be kept strained on that one object until at last it
grows, so as to maintain itself before the mind with ease. This strain of the
attention is the fundamental act of will."William James suggests that the act
of will is fundamentally an effort of attention because minds wander and
thoughts drift, like particles who are subject to random movement or who drift
away due to increasing entropy. Our ability to focus attention, especially in
the face of competing distractions, is therefore central to our experience of
exercising free will.Free will is according to James related to the question
what are the forces that increase or influence our attention. If I understand
him correctly this means to identify the forces that reduce our "entropy of
thought", and thereby our freedom of choice, correct? For example in the case
of addiction the entropy of thought is reduced to 0, because the addict is only
able to think of one thing, the object of desire, and one action, to get more
of it. In this sense free will would mean a high entropy of thought.-J.
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