Peter,
I am not a fan at all of the “free will versus determinism” debate. I don’t find that to be a useful frame at all. I first point to the Enlightenment Gap to argue that we have very poorly framed notions about the proper relationships
between matter and mind.
I believe I am a “fourth dimensional entity”. That is, I operate on the Culture-Person plane of existence, the plane of self-conscious justification. I am a strange loop of causation relative to cause-effect relations at the Matter dimension.
Descriptively, I clearly make choices. That is, there are things that are under my domain of self-control that I purposefully impact. For example, I have the freedom to respond to this email. I do not have the freedom to choose to levitate above my chair or
eliminate the COVID 19 virus from the earth.
The egoic narrator/persona is a justifying system that is about regulating affect and impulse and action and determining what is justifiable and what is not. That is its structural functional organization. I seek to be “self-determined”
in the sense that I attempt to coherently integrate and organize my bodily, animalistic, primate, and environmental structures toward adaptive living (or dignity and well-being with integrity or wisdom energy).
Best,
Gregg
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Gregg,
Thank you for sharing.
I am happy to see how comfortable Christian Smith is with defending free will. "By person I mean a conscious, reflective, embodied, self-transcending center of subjective experience, durable identity,
...who—as the efficient cause of his or her own responsible actions and interactions…"
You also quoted Edward O Wilson, who I didn’t understand very well 40 years ago. His fairly recent book The Meaning of Human Existence nicely outlines his faith in human autonomy of choice. Without freedom, Wilson contends, a conscious
mind would be without purpose. Coming from a man of science, this is refreshing.
Within the last few years I reread BF Skinner’s philosophy of behaviorism, About Behaviorism, and Beyond Freedom & Dignity. In this books Skinner claims we do not have free will, saying that we are shaped by the contingencies of our environment
and the only means for changing one’s behavior is to change their environment. He then concedes that we can change our own environments, serving as controller of our behavior. I change my environment every time I read a book. Go for a walk. Ask someone a question...
My question to you, do you differ with Smith’s and Wilson's defense of free will?
Thank you again,
Peter
Peter Lloyd Jones
562-209-4080
Sent by determined causes that no amount of will is able to thwart.