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 real
m, 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.
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