Conscious Will
Ken Armstrong
armstron at ohiou.edu
Tue Apr 30 07:48:45 EDT 2002
At 01:48 PM 04/29/2002 -0400, you wrote:
> >>Well, I suppose that the author might argue something along those
> lines. But supposing the author said the book came about as a result of
> many discussions. Does this mean that free will was necessarily
> involved, that the process was fully conscious or that consciousness was
> necessary for the book to have been produced. Granted I think it is
> unlikely that the author would argue that consciousness did not even
> accompany the process by which the book developed but as you know
> correlation does not necessarily imply cause. (Moreover there is some
> experimental evidence that consciousness occurs after one makes a
> choice --not concurrently or before.)
Jim,
Granted correspondence does not imply cause (thinking it did, M. McLuhan
would say, was why NASA's focus was on overcoming the power of
gravitational force rather understanding levity), let's take our loosely
used terms as precisely as we can. The question is not just whether
consciousness is involved in the book's coming into being, but conscious
will. Did the author decide to write a book? Or is will an illusion? I
submit to you that the willful act of seriously presenting an argument for
the non-existence of will is the plague of dyadic thinking, right down to
the end of excluding the legitimacy of triadic thinking. it would be funny
if it weren't happening.
Josiah Royce created a schematic for cognition (perhaps hoisted from
Peirce?). On a line put perception, conception, and interpretation. To
steal my lit. theory professor's example: are the stars out tonight? That
question calls for perception. Why is it that when I turn the key in the
ignition, my car won't start? That calls for conception. Why is it that
when I move my lips and make faces at an interlocutor, I think I am
communicating? That calls for interpretation. We live in a percept-concept
oriented society, where the drive, as exhibited in Wegner, is to subdue all
phenomenon to the percept-concept model. This is the world that WP is
consciously reacting against in much of his writing, esp. e.g. The San
Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind. It is, as someone else pointed out, the
dualist world where one side is always trying to subdue the other, and in
this time of the heyday of science, the humanity of the person is the
constant target of people like Wegner, Dennet, and all the lords and
ladies of dyadic thinking whom logic fails when they are asked to reflect
on their own actions. Ironically, to the degree that Wegner is unconscious
of this situation, he lacks the "conscious will" to address the situation
that he thinks he's addressing. This does not prove him correct.
Yrs.,
Ken Armstrong
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