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 overcom
e'." (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 c
ome 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."
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