Episode 180: More James’s Psychology: Self and Will (Part Two)

0:00 Wes: If that seems counterintuitive, it's another case in which James thinks the whole is greater than simply the sum of the parts. Because we're responding to so many different physiological reactions in ourselves. It's sort of like a physiological pointillism. We can still have this complex subjective state, fear, and yet have it be based upon our these feelings of physiological states. Which I think is a very interesting theory. I think when I read that, I'm like, whoa, that's like really easily empirically testable, right? Because there's people who are quadriplegic, and if you have a high enough spinal cord injury, you are really cut off from any impulses going back and forth between your body and your brain.

In fact, if it's high enough, you can't even breathe. Your brain can't even regulate your breathing or your heart. And they've actually done studies on this. So there have been studies on quadriplegics to see if there's any dampening of the emotions because of the lack of feedback from the body, from the lack of awareness or lack of feeling of any physiological response in the body. As far as I can tell, there isn't really any evidence to support that there isn't a dampening of emotions. So that's what I got out of the emotion chapter.

1:09 Mark: Well, let me give the other category of objection. I've characterized this before as Bob Solomon's view where he felt like, yeah, okay, there's a physiological feeling aspect to an emotion, but that's just kind of like a little queasiness or something. It really under determines what the emotion is. What makes it an emotion as opposed to just a feeling is the judgments involved. So there's lots of ways that you could Sort of broadly get mad at something. But what makes it resentment versus just a blind rage versus just being upset is a judgment that you've been wronged, for instance.

1:43 Wes: Mm.

1:43 Mark: So that makes it sound like it's not just experiencing that my face is getting all hot and that's what the emotion is. It certainly has a cognitive component and certainly James is aware of that. So what is he going to say in response to that? How does he fit that into his phenomenology here? These obvious phenomenological facts about the differences, the very minute gradations? I mean, he's going to. He is going to say that it's just because there are lots of different. Different parts of the brain and as different ones of them or lots of different parts of the body. And so it's just very subtle variations in how hot our face is or whatever that will distinguish resentment from anger.

2:20 Wes: Well, it's what I call a kind of physiological pointillism. Right. In the sense that the whole will be greater than the sum of those parts, so that you can get these very fine gradations and emotions out of that sort of tapestry of different physiological reactions that you're aware of.

2:35 Dylan: Yeah, I was really surprised about how far he went in that section, because when I was reading through it, I thought he was going to make the point that emotions and feelings are physiological in pointing to some kind of brain parts and manifestations of physiological activity in the brain and going so far as to say that other parts of the body's physiology would contribute to that. But I was surprised that he went as far as to say that you can't feel emotions without. In fact, he knows that he's being radical here, but it's that, for instance, the act of blushing is what makes you embarrassed.

It doesn't seem that his way of thinking about these matters as having a very, very, very decisive physiological component requires him to go that far. And even the observation that you can have emotional responses engendered by that kind of physiological occurrence. So you have a kind of physiological reaction that then you feel an emotion as opposed to having the emotion elicit the physiological response. I don't think you have to go as far as he does to acknowledge that you can have it go that way.

3:50 Mark: It's the physiological response elicits the emotion, or the physiological response is the emotion

3:56 Wes: in some important way, or you mean awareness of it as the emotion. The dilemma is either it causes the emotion or awareness of it is the emotion, and I think it's the latter.

4:06 Mark: Like, can a dog or some animal. Let's just say there's a certain level of animal. Maybe you think dogs are extra self reflective, but that you might want to say can experience an emotion but yet is not aware of itself experiencing emotion. So it really doesn't require that sort of self consciousness, but we're saying really requires the self consciousness that you are being aware of something that your body is doing. Doesn't he say like, you know, a spider can be afraid if it acts afraid, it's afraid.

4:32 Wes: Yeah, I'm not talking about self awareness. I'm just talking about your feeling of the bodily state being the emotion, which is different than saying the bodily state is the emotion. You understand? My feeling of bodily state is not the same thing as the bodily state.

4:47 Dylan: Yeah.

4:48 Mark: So are we saying though then that there has to be for a spider for it to have an emotion, it has to have a stream of consciousness. That everything that has experiences at all has a stream of consciousness. And anything that is not reacting purely by reflex has. Or maybe even if you are reflecting reacting purely by reflex that you have. As soon as there is awareness of one thing of another, then there is consciousness. In other words, the fact that something reacts to something else using sense organs as opposed to just using the laws of physics, which is not really a reaction. Yeah. The spider might not be aware of the foot or about to step on it and then somehow is aware of the foot and it runs away, it is scared. So that is attributing some basic sense of stream of consciousness to it.

5:39 Wes: Sure, that's a whole other topic.

5:43 Mark: This is relevant here because what we're getting into with the will chapter again into freedom is ultimately what makes. I don't want to say consciousness, because I just said consciousness actually is quite basic and it doesn't even require self consciousness. It doesn't require an abstraction necessarily. Well, maybe freedom does, we can get to that. But it certainly seems like, you know, you could be kind of really so drunk that you don't have any appreciable self consciousness. You don't think about yourself as a thinking being, but yet you're not simply jerking yourself around by reflex, but you are doing it by whim. Right. Whim seems to imply that you have self awareness. So like that is the amount of self awareness you'd have to have to have a stream of consciousness to have emotions, to have freedom.

6:30 Wes: Should we move on to free will?

6:32 Dylan: Yes. Or to will. Right. It becomes free later. Right.

6:36 Wes: It's free at the very last section. I guess it's free. That's the only place where we talk about free will.

6:41 Mark: Right. So that's the question that I'm trying to figure out as we go through here is at what point does. Again, we don't want to say consciousness, maybe we want to say intelligence, maybe we just want to say freedom. At what point does that arise in. I think this is kind of the genius of his account here is that it's not like a light turns on with consciousness. And so you could have Descartes saying, oh, all animals are just act on reflex and they don't really feel pain, then just torture them all you want.

7:09 Dylan: The way he starts with it is this whole idea of voluntary acts, which in your spider analogy, and to the extent that you would say things that act voluntarily have consciousness and so that would make all sorts of things like spiders have consciousness because they are committing voluntary acts.

7:27 Mark: Are they?

7:28 Wes: Yeah. He explicitly says animals can perform voluntary because a voluntary act is just one. It begins as a reflex act, but then that action leaves an image in the memory and then the memory can lead to desire, which means you can will that. So as long as you can store up a memory of some originally reflex action to something, you can repeat it in a non reflex mode of behavior or frame of mind.

7:56 Mark: Right. I think he early on, I don't remember the quote, but in one of those intro chapters he explained intelligence. And as something where the means are flexible, he contrasts a magnet.

8:07 Seth: Right.

8:08 Mark: You might want to say that you drop iron filings on a magnet and it seems like you could use teleological language. The iron filings want to go to the magnet. But the fact is if you put a piece of paper in front of them and if the iron filings would just move over an inch, they could get past that piece of paper and go to the magnet, but they won't do it. And that shows that they are not intelligent, that they don't have whatever this thing, if we can call it consciousness, they're just being drawn.

8:34 Dylan: I mean, I'll push back on that. Look, that's not any different than the way a fly behaves towards light.

8:40 Wes: Right.

8:40 Dylan: Or my dog behaves towards trying to go out the door.

8:45 Wes: Well, his example, he gives the example of a frog, right. Where he's going to say actually no, it's different in the fly or the dog because if something gets in their way, they're not simply going to cling to the obstacle like the iron filaments cling to the paper trying to get to the magnet. They're going to do the equivalent of going around the paper. They have enough executive function to figure out how to get what they want by directing their bodies to move around the obstacle or do something else with the obstacle. And that's for James, the. Is it intelligence marks, Is that the word he uses? That's sort of the essence.

9:19 Mark: I think it's just mind. That's it. It's not intelligence, it's just what is mind? Mind is being able to do that.

9:24 Wes: Yeah.

9:25 Dylan: Okay, so that's fine. And I can buy that and just say that certain kinds of minds are stupider than others and that's fine.

9:32 Wes: Yes, that's fine. Your dog might do that sometimes.

9:37 Mark: Yeah, people do it too. They do the same, you know, stupid behavior over and over again and don't figure out how to essentially go around and get what they want. But the fact that we're not successful, that we're not intelligent enough, doesn't mean we don't have minds.

9:50 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, I was just thinking of a fruit fly trap. Right. When I go to the lake and I get the damn fruit flies and I put a glass cup upside down on a plate with a tiny gap in the bottom and a piece of strawberry in the center and it fills up with fruit flies that fly in, but they don't fly out.

10:07 Wes: Right.

10:09 Dylan: But they still have mines. They're just stupid. That's why I can trap them.

10:15 Mark: I guess the question is, do they simply stick to the top or do they thrash around inside the glass?

10:21 Dylan: They thrash around inside the glass.

10:23 Seth: Yeah.

10:23 Unknown speaker: So there you go.

10:24 Mark: That's their mind.

10:25 Dylan: There you go.

10:25 Mark: They're not simply like the iron filing sticking to the damn glass.

10:30 Dylan: That's exactly the right distinction.

10:32 Mark: Try something else. How do we get from there to

10:36 Wes: voluntary action where we had started saying, you know, James says the involuntary is actually a prerequisite of the voluntary. That the voluntary is just a repetition of something that was previously involuntary and reflex. By calling to mind a memory and having a desire for that thing and then doing on a non reflex basis, which would what we once did on a reflex basis, which is to go

10:58 Mark: after that thing either if reflex basis or even just randomly. Right?

11:02 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I guess a few.

11:04 Mark: Or it could be instinctively. It's just something that's not voluntary. No creature not endowed with divinatory power can perform an act voluntarily for the first time. To have volition, you have to have a goal in mind. You have to think that doing this is going to get me what I want. Well, how do you know it's going to get you what you want is because you did it by accident, by reflex, by instinct, by emotional movement. These are all primary performances, what he says. And then once that's done, once the nerve centers are so organized that certain stimuli pull the trigger of certain explosive parts. And a creature going through one of these explosions for the first time undergoes an entirely new novel experience. Then after that. So he calls voluntary acts secondary. Just the fact that you can do the thing a second time intentionally.

11:46 Wes: Yep.

11:47 Seth: A supply of ideas of the various movements that are possible left in the memory by experiences of their involuntary performance. Is thus the first prerequisite of the voluntary life. In reading this, I was struck by the sense in which it reminded me of kind of radical empiricism. We can't. I'm thinking way back here, like this is the first thing you learn in undergraduate. When you take, you know, the empiricist and the rationalist. But this idea that you have to have ideas built out of experience. And your ideas are either based on experience or they're constructions from experience.

Right. So a unicorn is really just the concept. The horse plus the horn and all that sort of thing. It struck me that something like this is probably subject to the same criticism as that radical empiricism. I'm struggling. There's kind of two parts to this notion that the voluntary is based on the involuntary. The first is the ability to imagine what's possible. That, in a sense, what he's saying is you can't try to accomplish anything that you haven't already experienced before. You don't have the ability to imagine something that you haven't experienced before.

And the second is the notion of power or the efficacy of being able to accomplish it. So at the beginning of that chapter, he says, talk about desire, wish and will. If we desire something we don't think we can achieve, it's a wish. If we believe that the end is in our power, then we will it. So there's kind of like both built into this concept. The notion of being able to have the idea of X. And also having some kind of a sense of whether or not you can actually accomplish X. Well, if you can only conceive of things that you previously accomplished involuntarily.

And then you have to kind of voluntarily will it. How in the world would you have a concept that was not possible to attain? There would be no such thing as a wish. Because if you tried to voluntarily will something that you had previously accomplished before involuntarily.

13:57 Wes: Well, let's say you want to become president Obviously, James doesn't think that you have to have experienced that personally. You don't have to experience becoming president or something like that, but you have to have experience that there is such a thing as being president and all that stuff. And I think it's important to point out. So we're actually restricted in this first, at the very beginning, we're talking about bodily movements because that is, for James, the primary example of what it means to Will. That's the only thing over which we have direct control is our body.

And so that is sort of the paradigmatic example of willing something. When you get to other more complex examples, that it seems to me like there would be room, right, for him to say, well, we can imagine doing things that we've never done, and we can wish to do those things, or even Will doing those things. But in some sense, they're based on previous experience. So if I see a mineral which has never been discovered before, and I'm the first person who's ever going to pick it up, it's not that I have to have picked it up before to will myself to pick it up, but I have to have some previous experience of doing something with my limbs, doing a picking up sort of activity.

15:08 Seth: Right. But then you're building it out of the blocks of your experience.

15:12 Wes: Yeah.

15:12 Seth: You're putting together all these different individual pieces of experience to create a visualization or projection or an idea of the potentiality of something that you have never directly experienced before.

15:27 Wes: Yeah. And those building blocks. He says, this kind of leads us to the next section of this. Because those building blocks can be kinesthetic or they can be what he calls passive, but really teleological. So they can be. The memory can be of a certain feeling in the limb that I moved, or it can be the memory of the movement of the limb. It can be the memory of that action, that specific bodily action, or it can be a memory of something. I wanted to obtain some end. And the more advanced we are as willing beings, the more advanced in consciousness we are, the more we are reaching towards ends.

And we don't even think. If I think, oh, I want that Diet Coke over there, and I reach for it. It's not based on any kinesthetic memory of, oh, this is what reaching feels like. It's just, I want that. I'm gonna get it. And the rest is below the conscious awareness. It's simply procedural knowledge. So the kinesthetic part falls into the background. And what I'm consciously aware of is having some end. Ultimately, why all of that is important is just all James wants to really say here is that when we will things, we're motivated by ideas. The willing starts with an idea or it can.

And not just with something that's perceived outside of us or a stimulus outside of us that just reproduces some reflexive response. We actually, we have our own ideas and these lead to movement, which is very important to his whole theory later on about how attention and figures into the possibility of freely willing something or. Or something. Or how the quantity of attention factors in our relationship is fundamentally to an idea.

17:08 Seth: I understand what you're saying, and I'm trying to connect this notion of the voluntary and the involuntary to his empiricism. Because we learn all of our possibilities by the ways of experience. Well, maybe the dividing line is not necessarily between the empiricism and this notion of involuntary and voluntary, but like you said, Wes, the difference between kinesthetic and sort of non kinesthetic types of actions.

17:41 Wes: Yeah. So I was trying to get us at the two ideas. The cues to action, the cues to actually moving our bodies, to willing something and then moving our bodies. Right. They could just be entirely outside of us. Perceptual stimuli. He wants to get us away from that, towards the idea of ideas being motor cues, what he calls motor cues. Ideas can move us. And then he divides those up into the kinesthetic and the passive, which are again, the passive are more about reaching out for things that we want ideas of. Not of the. The feeling in the limb, for instance, but something that we want to get by moving the limb.

18:18 Seth: There's so many things about this that are disquieting to me. Try this experiment. Will yourself to raise your hand. Like actually say to yourself, okay, I am going to make myself raise my hand and compare that experience of doing that to like an involuntary thing where you. There's a fly and your hand jerks up to wave the fly out of the way. You can't actually recreate the involuntary experience. When you think, I'm going to raise my hand, you're not actually telling your muscles or your arms to do something. You simply make the decision to do it. And there is in a sense, the same involuntary reaction. It's just motivated by a different stimulus. In the case of the fly, your hand raises up to wave it away. And in the case of your mind, you just tell your hand, wave my hand above my head or in my front of my face.

19:18 Wes: Yeah. What makes one voluntary and the other not is purely the fact that one comes from an Idea, the voluntary one comes from your conscious idea of doing it right. You at least you said, I'm going to think of yourself raising the hand now. And we all thought, okay, we're going to raise our hands and then we did it. The voluntary part of that is just that relation between those two events. The idea that I had that I was going to do it and then the fact that I did it in the fly brushing off the fly case. There was no preceding idea that said I'm going to brush the fly off. It just happened.

19:50 Seth: So is the concept that the involuntary precedes the voluntary just because developmentally we react involuntarily prior to having the ability to have an idea and motivate action from an idea versus stimulus?

20:06 Wes: Well, I don't know. Suppose I had never been brushed anything off, or suppose I had never raised my hand and never seen anyone else raise their hand.

20:13 Seth: Then there's just no way you would ever have the idea that you might raise your hand. That just strikes me as absurd.

20:19 Wes: Is it absurd?

20:20 Mark: I mean, he's arguing against an overemphasis on spiritualism, an overemphasis on a Cartesian. My mind is a self enclosed place and that's where my will happens and that's where my emotions happen. And I could not even just not have a body and still feel emotions and still have will. He's emphasizing like insofar as we have an introspection of will at all, then it's like imagining, if I think a word and really pay attention to what it is to think the word, well, probably your mouth starts to kind of make the word. He always wants to turn these things that we think are purely mental in awareness of something that is physiological. And so the same thing with willing your arm to move. Insofar as we have an introspection about it at all, it's something muscular, it's the kinesthetic imagining of the arm moving or something.

21:14 Wes: So he does reject that, the idea that it has to be kinesthetic. And ultimately he, he's going to say, really mostly we're focused on the sensible effects. We're focused on what we want to accomplish. Like again, I want that Diet Coke. I don't anticipate that with an idea of my arm moving towards the Diet Coke or what it feels for my arm to move. I'm focused on the Diet Coke, like sensibly. The idea, the motor cue for my movement of my arm isn't anything even a thought about my arm. It's just the Diet Coke and I want the Diet Coke and I'm going to get the Diet Coke.

21:47 Mark: But both of those are in contract to a thought about the will itself as a purely internal thing that we are focusing on some external. That's the experience of willing.

21:56 Wes: I think there is a little bit of an internal part because he wants again to talk about ideas as motor cues. The fact that it comes from our own ideas as being the voluntary part of it. So this does preserve a little bit of the whole. What makes it voluntary is that it's cued by an idea and not just cued by the object. I mean, even in the case where I see the Diet Coke and it's obviously cued by the object and I may reflexively grasp for it in an involuntary way that that may involuntarily happen. But if I look at it and this will get us to the later section, I think, oh no, I shouldn't be drinking another Diet Coke today. And I start deliberating about it and then I finally say, no, I'm going to have one, then I'm back in the voluntary realm. So it's a question of our relationship to our ideas.

22:41 Dylan: Well, the same thing would be true of any type of getting of something. Trying to get something. It doesn't even have to be self denial.

22:47 Wes: Right.

22:47 Dylan: It can be. I really want to beat this guy in this race. I really want to lift this object. I really want to solve this problem. There's a reason why we use language of willing for that. It's because that's what's describing the activity in the Jamesian account.

23:02 Wes: Yeah, I think the other important thing about relating this willing to ideas is that when we talk about what moves us to do things, what James wants to do is he wants to make sort of the will, this more general thing that's imminent in experience. So that every idea that we have is actually a motor cue. And if it doesn't produce action, that doesn't mean it's not because it's trying to produce action. It is trying to produce action of some sort, but it might be inhibited by something else. So we don't always. There's this other element of what he calls fiat where I say, okay, I've made a decision to do something for James that's possible.

There are some cases of willing that are like that, but many cases of willing do not require that element of fiat. It just can be. There's an idea and then there's a motor action that follows from that idea. And in fact, every idea we have Is actually pushing us to do something. And we don't need any further explanation of what leads us from idea to action. There doesn't need to be any in between there.

24:04 Dylan: That's right. And in fact, it would go as far as. Save for the involuntary physiological activities that we have. Like hearts beating and stuff like that. All of our motor activity involves ideas. When I get up out of bed and I walk across the room, that involves ideas.

24:22 Wes: Well, no, sorry to disagree with you again.

24:26 Dylan: You're gonna have to convince me of that.

24:27 Wes: So he has actually a passage on this.

24:30 Dylan: Read the passage. But just because it's habit based upon everything else he says doesn't mean that it's not an idea.

24:35 Wes: So he brings up, for instance, going through your daily routine in the morning, Putting on your hat and your tie and never thinking at all about it. So those would not be cases of voluntary behavior. They would actually just be involuntary procedural behavior.

24:51 Mark: Or you initiated voluntarily. But the sequence itself does not involve voluntary action every step of the way. Because that's the way habit works. Is one thing, triggers the next, triggers the next, triggers the next. It doesn't have to go back to sort of the central processing, decision making part of you to say, let's keep going.

25:09 Wes: So here's his example. So he quotes Lotze. We see in writing or piano playing. A great number of very complicated movements follow quickly, one upon the other. The instigating representation of which remains scarcely a second in consciousness. Certainly not long enough to awaken any other volition than the general one of resigning oneself without reserve to the passing over of representation into action. All the acts of our daily life happen in this wise are standing up, walking, talking. All this never demands a distinct impulse of the will. But is adequately brought about by the pure flux of thought. End of him quoting Lotze. In all of this, the determining condition of the unhesitating and resistless sequence of the act. Seems to be the absence of any conflicting notion in the mind.

25:50 Dylan: But the idea here is that even if ideas motivated the generation of motor movement Such that you develop habits, There's a range of motor activity that is much more like involuntary physiological activity. It just sort of happens without the activity of that thing we call will.

26:15 Wes: Yeah, Dylan, you're right. I think actually because he's calling this ideo-motor action. So this is a little above where I was reading. Wherever movement unhesitatingly and immediately follows upon an idea of it, we have ideo-motor action. We are then aware of nothing between the conception and the execution. And then he gives a bunch of Stuff, just the same sort of stuff we were talking about, like brushing away the dust or picking up a pen. No express resolve, but the mere perception of the object and the fleeting notion of the act seen of themselves to bring the letter about. So this is still voluntary in the sense that it's still this relationship. There's still an idea.

26:49 Dylan: Ideas cue motor activity. But you were making the point that that's not exactly always the seat of will, except in some kind of very attenuated sen. So you have both things going on. Ideas cueing motor activity, but not necessarily involving will, so to speak.

27:07 Wes: So he's going to say it does involve the will, but it's got to

27:10 Dylan: be some kind of attenuated form.

27:13 Wes: We're used to talking about the will in the context of deliberation. So it's only when someone has to deliberate that we typically will think of it as a question of a voluntary or involuntary action. I think for James, it's technically voluntary because it comes from an idea rather than just a stimulus. But ultimately what he wants to talk about in this chapter is the sense in which some ideas don't result in action because others conflict with them and rob them of their impulsive power. And then this whole idea of what he calls the fiat. We're used to thinking about will in terms of this fiat feature where we say, yes, I will do this.

Now that comes into play where we have to neutralize what he calls the antagonistic or inhibitory idea. We have this stream of consciousness, all these ideas all the time, all of those ideas are impelling us to move inherently. That's part of their nature. But there are other conflicting impulses that prevent that from happening. And sometimes those conflicts become something we have to deliberate over and ultimately produce a fiat about and say, okay, I'm going to either do this or I'm going to do this, right?

28:13 Mark: Just to add to the sort of high level picture I was describing at the beginning, that he has this picture of mentality as motor, where there's an incoming signal and there's an outgoing, there's a reception response. And you might think, couldn't that all happen literally as reflex? In other words, without ideas being involved at all? And certainly there are a lot of actions that do seem like that, but because we have sense organs and we use those to react, then, yeah, talking about these things as having an action loop in that way is not at all to say that they don't involve mind.

He has a chapter that we didn't read where he considers a behaviorist account of this, where couldn't you think that we just do this reaction without the mind even getting involved? Or if it is involved, it's just a bystander. It doesn't have causal power. And he has an evolutionary argument that like, well, we. We have consciousness. We have this stream of consciousness. We think we have minds. It would be silly if all that were going on and that developed evolutionarily without some purpose. So let's go ahead and just accept the obvious experiential information that yes, the mind is involved.

And so we can say both that there are these reflex loops and yet part of the loop, part of the causal chain. Here is an idea that is then triggering you. And we might even want to say triggering the will. Is that okay to say triggering the will?

29:28 Wes: What do you mean? Like, give me an example. Yeah.

29:31 Mark: So I see a can of Coke. I have a desire for Coke, so I reach out and grab it. It's not unconscious. I'm aware of what I'm doing. I didn't think about it. There was no sitting back and visualizing myself reaching out for the can of Coke. And maybe I didn't even stop to think, you know, boy, am I thirsty. I still want to say there's an idea. There's plenty of ideas involved in that.

29:53 Wes: I think you're right. And he would call that a willing, even though it's not a deliberative act. So his conception of the will is wider than deliberative acts. And the reason, what makes an act deliberative would be if there was something inhibiting you from simply doing that and then you had to make a decision, so you had no conflicts. In that case, you had no inhibitions about getting the Diet Coke and you just did it. It's an act of the will, but it's not a deliberative act.

30:18 Mark: It's a triumph of the will.

30:20 Wes: So he says, we may then lay it down for certain that every representation of a movement awakens in some degree the actual movement which is its object, and awakens it in the maximum degree wherever it is not kept from doing so by an antagonistic representation present simultaneously to the mind. The express fiat or act of mental consent to the movement comes in when the neutralization of the antagonistic and inhibitory idea is required. So we don't get to the level of a fiat, a deliberative sort of act of the will until we have such conflicts, until we actually have to neutralize inhibition, which I think is really a fascinating way to think about the will at this level. So deliberation is just indecision resulting from conflict, the feeling of effort.

31:04 Mark: There's a certain normal ratio in the impulsive power of different sorts of motive which characterizes what might be called ordinary healthiness of will. So he talks about the fact that the will can be unhealthy, that it can be explosive, that it can be too weak. This all sounds very Nietzschean.

31:23 Wes: So when he talks about the fifth form of decision, in which whether it's the case that all the evidence is there or not, we sort of feel like we have to make an effort. We have to use our willpower to accomplish something. And what I love about what I'm about to read is it's that he really gets at the sense that when we will things, we actually lose, we actually have to give something up. So he says, whether it be the dreary resignation for the sake of austere, naked duty, of all sorts of rich, mundane delights, or whether it be the heavy resolve that of two mutually exclusive trains of future facts, both sweet and good, and with no strictly objective or imperative principle of choice between them, one shall forevermore become impossible, while the other shall become reality.

It is a desolate and acrid sort of act, an entrance into a lonesome moral wilderness. Even in acting on one alternative, both alternatives are held in view. And in the very act of murdering the vanquished possibility, the chooser realizes how much in that instant he is making himself lose. And this ties into other areas of the book where you sort of. You know, when you make a choice, you're choosing a certain type of future self and killing off all the others. This gets at the very existential nature of certain types of choices.

32:42 Dylan: I would add into that activity this whole question of attention and how will is tied directly to attention. As he says, effort of attention is thus the essential phenomena of will.

32:55 Mark: We're not going to go into the Attention chapter that we read. But just to quote from the beginning of it, my experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind. Without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives access and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground, intelligible perspective. In a word, without it, the consciousness of every creature would be a gray, chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us to even conceive. So attention is kind of like the. I mean, do we want to say it's intelligence, it's consciousness, you know, the thing that makes the light turn on. But really, attention is the one faculty that we have that really brings all this different stuff together. It is the thing that distinguishes the stream of consciousness that we talked about last time.

33:37 Wes: Attention determines action. Following up to this, he will say all sorts of Nietzsche things about how pleasure and pain are actually not the primary springs of action. They have something to do with action. But anything that captures your attention can be a springboard to action. Any perception, any imagining. And in fact, most mental life, most of what we do is done without, even without reference to pleasure and pain. The class of the good is greater than the class of the pleasant. Really interesting idea of this. Much broader idea of motivation than the British empiricists have given us.

So again, anything that holds our attention can be a determinant of action. Any idea can be a kind of motor cue. And then what determines how much like force is behind an idea, its impulsiveness, how much it's going to urge us to act, is its capacity for compelling our attention, its ability to dominate our consciousness. It's really innovative.

34:30 Dylan: He 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. The so doing is the fiat, and it is a mere psychological incident that when the object is thus attended to, immediate motor consequences should ensue. Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of the will.

34:52 Mark: And what's great about attention is it's so hard to tell, much harder than moving the arm, whether it's voluntary or not.

34:59 Dylan: Sure.

34:59 Mark: From the attention chapter, he says there is no such thing as voluntary attention sustained for more than a few seconds at a time. What is called sustained voluntary attention is a repetition of successive efforts which bring back the topic to the mind.

35:12 Dylan: It makes you think of Socrates demon in a different way.

35:15 Wes: Right.

35:16 Dylan: That act of will doesn't have to be voluntary. Exactly.

35:21 Mark: It's pulled this way and that. It seems spontaneous.

35:24 Seth: Exactly.

35:24 Mark: Spontaneous is a better word than either reflexive or voluntary. It is a thing into itself. And this complicates the whole deal with the self, because it's not me, a substantial self, moving my attention around. No, it's like the contents of consciousness themselves kind of organize themselves by the attention flitting from thing to thing to thing. So it's really the me is the attention, it's not the thing that does the attention well.

35:51 Dylan: And this is the great thing about it. Right. Because that then gives you an avenue for that experience of feeling captured by something against your will. Right. So.

36:02 Wes: So here's one thing where I think James has something interesting to say here, because it's true, it's not a matter of our own volition, the types of things that capture our attention, but when we get into a deliberative state, basically we have two different sorts of ideas before our attention. So the drunkard, he uses the example the drunkard a lot, which I like has. There's an idea, of course they know they shouldn't be drinking. And then there are lots of other lame ideas like, well, it's Christmas or oh, this is like the finest whiskey, you know, I'm just going to do it this once.

And all these other things which are, if he attends to them enough, are going to overcome the other idea and impel him to act in that way. And the trick for the drunkard to resist all that is to be able to pay enough attention to the idea of his own well being and what the consequences of drinking are, what they really, really mean and all of that stuff. And the fact that those two things will be in conflict and be the things capturing his attention are not under voluntary control, but the effort of attention. James wants to leave open the possibility that despite all the determinism there about what's going to be, you know, what our conflicts are going to be, it's possible that the effort of attention might be an independent variable, might stand outside of the deterministic stream.

37:21 Mark: Well, I like the way he puts it. It's not even that, the way you were putting it, that he's not paying attention to his health, but he's not, he's not allowing into his mind the thought that he is a drunkard. That is the only thought that he will not allow in which that's funny because it's not like it's a matter of admitting it. Is it a fact that he's a drunkard? It's more of an interpretation. There are different interpretations of his situation.

37:44 Seth: I'm not a waiter.

37:46 Mark: Yes, exactly. And so talking about it in terms of not which interpretation are you choosing to accept, but the fact that all these interpretations kind of just occur to you and it's a matter of which one you are focusing your attention on. That sounds quite different than accepting as fact, but just focusing your attention on it as motivation.

38:07 Wes: This actually, when I was reading this reminded me of our discussion of Aristotle, our second discussion of the Nicomachean Ethics and the incontinence, where Aristotle is thinking about Plato's claim that no one knowingly does evil, or it's a question of knowledge whether you're going to do the right thing. And Aristotle would end up saying well, Plato is right and wrong at the same time. In a way the incontinent person knows that they shouldn't be in this case drinking. But in a way they don't know if they really knew. That would be the equivalent of giving the right attention, of being aware that drinking is bad.

For me, just paying the right amount of attention to that idea would be the equivalent of having the right sort of knowledge for Aristotle, leading to the right sort of action. There's a way in which the weak level, so Aristotle want to say, yet, you know, the incontinent person does know they shouldn't drink and has a kind of weak second grade knowledge of that. That's sort of the weak attention. I think for William James, you have the idea but you can't sustain it before your, your mind and you let all the excuses creep in. It's Christmas. Oh, it doesn't matter this one time.

39:15 Dylan: And that sounds really right, but it's

39:18 Mark: the kind of pragmatic version of that because it's not a matter of the truth is that he's a drunkard. The truth is that, you know, it is in your objective self interest to do such and such. It's again a kind of a matter of which interpretation you're paying attention to. And I really wanted to bring this back to the self, that when we're talking about the social self and we were saying, you know, we were giving exactly this kind of Aristotelian argument about not going for the $1 in the hand when you could stay your desire and have $2 in the future, that that's more rational and just the fact that you know all these elements of your social self, you know, I don't think we even gave the quote here.

The most interesting about the thing about the social self is that a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind. So it's not that all these social selves are like objectively true or something. That's not even kind of the point. It's just that the fact that these are images that, that we interact with, they are pragmatic realities for us and we can choose to focus our attention on them or not focus our attention on them. It's much less a matter of are you being objectively correct in where you're putting your attention as something more in line with the existentialist take on this.

40:28 Wes: So I think with the drunkard there's a true and false though, right?

40:31 Mark: You could interpret existentialist take on the drunkard, that, oh, maybe you're a drunkard philosopher king, the drunken master in the Jackie Chan movie called that. Where there might be ways that even as a drunkard you can interpret this as. Well, you know, I'm a poet. Poets are supposed to be drunk. That's how I do my best poetry.

40:51 Wes: You're a high functioning drunkard.

40:54 Mark: Exactly. So it's an objective fact that you have a physical craving and will go into withdrawal if you don't drink. There are definite physical facts involved here. But how you ultimately interpret that in terms of values and what you should be doing. I think James is much more, I don't want to say he goes so far as existentialist, but yeah, it's much

41:16 Wes: different to be a Charles Bukowski and just to say, yes, I'm an alcoholic and that's the way I want to live my life and be a great writer at the same time and to see the alcohol as toxic to one's life and want to get rid of it but not be able to. But I don't know, on Jamesian grounds, isn't it conceivable that a Bukowski could be wrong?

41:36 Mark: I think James does tend to assume, just in his offhand comments, again, he's not giving an ethical treatise, but that, yeah, you know, we realize that some actions are honorable and some are not honorable. And the dynamic is very much like Aristotelianism where if you keep in mind the thing that really does prick at your conscience, he just doesn't get the technical details of, you know, when we were talking about Adam's Smith's impartial spectator, which is very much like what Wes, you were describing as the limit case in the social self, that is it getting at something objectively good or does it ultimately boil down to something theological and absolute, or is it merely a projection based on your present beliefs or something like that.

As a pragmatist, I would say James would safely be in the second category. Right. That we, even if there are objective moral truths floating out there, we don't interact with them. So we kind of have to go with what we actually have at our disposal. That would be his, you know, a pragmatist take on ethics. But given that, like there could be some very strong, very absolutist rules that we just, whether they come from culture or they're part of nature, maybe we're not even in a position to decide that. But the upshot is something like moral objectivity.

42:49 Wes: We just said, what volitional effort is Sustained effort of attention, in a word, volition is a psychic or moral fact, pure and simple, and is absolutely completed when the stable state of the idea is there. And then farther on to sustain a representation, to think is in short, the only moral act. The terminus of volition is the idea. And then we get into the question of free will. He recasts the question of free will according to his new theory of attention. And for him it's again, it's a question of the amount, the quantity of effort that we can put into attending to something.

The question is whether that's a completely deterministic function of variables like character or habit or motive, or if it can be an independent variable which stands outside all of all those things, which isn't simply just an effect within the deterministic stream. That ability to give things different quantities of attention.

43:52 Dylan: And he wants to just sort of make that the sum total of it and dodge this question about whether or not there's a free will from kind of other grounds and just say, pragmatically there's free will in the fact that there is varying amounts of attention and varying amounts of effort involved.

44:11 Wes: Yeah, he just says, well, we can't know, right? Yeah.

44:14 Dylan: He says the question of fact in the free will controversy is thus extremely simple. It relates solely to the amount of effort of attention which we can at any time put forth. Then later on he says, the fact is that the question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.

44:29 Wes: Yeah, you have to do metaphysics to discuss it. And it's probably insoluble on those grounds too.

44:35 Dylan: But this question of effort ends up being that pragmatic way of talking about the will that has ethical import. So later on he just makes the move that the fact that certain things are harder to do than others, having to do with our attention and all the other things we were talking about earlier, that gives it ethical content. And so it allows for you to have judgments of good and bad and allows you to have laws that restrict people that have conventions of behavior and ways of talking about our own self regulation. All of that together without getting tied up in whether or not your will is actually free or not.

45:13 Wes: Yeah, he says the most, the deepest measure of our worth comes from the amount of effort that we can make. We measure ourselves by our strength, our intelligence, our wealth, all those sorts of things. But those seem more external ultimately than the most internal. Sort of criterion of our worth seems to be this capacity to make these efforts of will which turn out to be efforts of attention what's great about

45:38 Dylan: this way of talking about it to me is he while consistently acknowledging and even grounding himself in a physical manifestation of our experience of mind, he doesn't make the mistake of saying, well, because my understanding of the physical world is deeply deterministic, that means that there is no free will because of that level of determinism. What he says is the phenomenological manifestation of effort and of choice and of the need to have attention on things means that even if there's some kind of causal relationship within all that, it ends up being a fringy, ill, determined, constantly active phenomena that smells like free will, walks like free will and talks like free will.

And to me it leads you down a path of having a much more complicated understanding of what it would mean to be deterministic. That is, you could have multiple solutions, multiple consequences, so that it can still be physical in basis without having to be deterministic in a naive way.

46:56 Mark: Let me just read an paragraph he's got on fatalism. There's a fatalistic argument for determinism, however, which is radically vicious. When a man has let himself go time after time, he easily becomes impressed with the enormously preponderant influence of circumstances, hereditary habits and temporary bodily distinction dispositions over what might seem a spontaneity born for the occasion. All is fate, he then says, all is resultant of what pre exists. Even if the moment seems original, it is but the instable molecules passively tumbling in their pre appointed way.

It is hopeless to resist the drift, vain to look for any new force coming in. And less perhaps than anywhere else under the sun, is there anything really mine in the decisions which I make. This really is no argument for simple determinism. There runs through it the sense of a force which might make things otherwise from one moment to another, if only it were strong enough to breast the tide. A person who feels the impotence of free effort in this way has the acutest notion of what is meant by it and of its possible independent power. How else could he be so conscious of its absence and that of its effects?

That almost seems like he's describing somebody in Sartre in bad faith. You're denying that freedom exists, but the way that you're expressing that is, yeah, okay, there is freedom. I'm just not strong enough to pull it off.

48:11 Wes: Yeah, I think he wants to leave room for the possibility of free will in a deterministic universe. I think so.

48:19 Mark: That would be the. He's a compatibilist, but it's much different

48:23 Wes: though than the compatibilism of a Dennett though, or a Kant.

48:26 Mark: Yeah, say a little more about that because I was thinking that it is actually quite similar to a Dennett or a Kant.

48:31 Wes: Let's do Kant's version. I've mentioned this before on the podcast and people have asked me to explain it. So I think this is a good time to explain it. And it comes from the, this example comes from the groundwork of the. The metaphysics of morals. Kant kind of just brushes over it, but it's a really good example if you want to think about free will in a deterministic universe. Which is to say, suppose you make a great scientific discovery tomorrow and you have all the insights that go into that. Alternatively, it could just be you, you figure out how to prove something mathematically and you have the whole set of subjective experiences that involved in that discovering that proof.

And you say to yourself, yeah, I did that. That was me. And then a Sam Harris comes along and he says, no, silly, that was just your brain. That it's not that you had any insight into the nature of mathematics or science or the universe. You just. Your brain clicked along according to these deterministic processes and that led to you churning out this proof or this scientific discovery. Of course we would reject that. And similarly, Kant says you should reject the notion that just because the everything is deterministic at the level of the brain, that there isn't some real sense, you know, or the brain when it's making some sort of decision is analogously like the scientist or the mathematician making the discovery.

You're going through a reasoning process, it's just that it's going to. Instead of ending in a discovery, it ends in a decision. We wouldn't deny the reality of the discovery of the scientist just because it's underwritten by deterministic brain processes. Similarly, we shouldn't deny the reality of a decision just because it's underwritten by deterministic brain processes. Which is to say we can be responsive to reasons, we can be reason responsive, we can make decisions based on those reasons and based on our insights and determinism. Brain determinism doesn't vitiate that, even if it underwrites it, you know, at a biological level.

So that idea of being, and this is also a kind of Leibnizian idea as well. Where you are, your freedom comes from constraint. I am constrained by math, I am constrained by the laws of physics. I am constrained by truth, by the reality of the world. In a way, for these philosophers, that's the only conceptually coherent notion of freedom. It's not to be without constraint. It's to be constrained by the right things. It's to be responsive to the right things.

51:01 Mark: So I think that's exactly Dennett's position too. Just so you're saying. Just so you know.

51:05 Wes: Yeah. To me that sounded like what Dennett's argument against her. Because I read that course that his. Dennett put up this really great, very clear response to Sam Harris, which went through. Sounded very similar, but for someone like James, it sounds like he's not thinking about reason, responsiveness per se. He's thinking about this effort thing that's possibly exempt from the deterministic causal chain and over which we somehow might have some control. Do you see what I'm saying? It seems like two different things to me.

51:38 Seth: He thinks they're two different things. He says we can therefore leave the free will question in altogether out of our account. Because he's characterizing this notion of human development and human existence as reflex and habit. And the effort that he talks about, when he talks about effort is the effort to overcome reflex and habit and do something against that flow. That, in essence, is his psychological characterization of what we call free will. He's not interested in doing metaphysics. He's not interested in knowing whether you have free will or not. What he's interested in doing is saying, insofar as you involuntarily and reflexively live your life, you are determined insofar as you will and are voluntary and overcome with effort, struggle against your habits, then you have free will.

52:39 Wes: So not if the struggle is part of the deterministic chain. Right. So in other words, it's not just that I am a struggler and a resistor of my impulses. That doesn't imply that I have free will in this sense. It's that the quantity of effort that I can put into attending the right. The right idea and therefore put into willing something, the question is whether that is determined, it's just a product of character and all that stuff, or whether that is what he calls an independent variable that stands outside of the deterministic framework that somehow I have a bare control over and is not a function of anything else about me or the world.

53:21 Mark: Well, no, it stands epistemically outside. And this is again, this is the pragmatism. This is before he wrote the book Pragmatism before or he would describe this as pragmatism.

53:30 Wes: He frames the question of free will as a metaphysical question. He doesn't deny that this is a metaphysical question, and that's why he's going to say he can't give any decision about it from a psychological standpoint. It's a question that's left metaphysicians and that has to be framed in the way that I just articulated. I think that's the way he articulates it.

53:50 Mark: No, the question, though, is even if we were determined, even if the amount of effort we can put forward is determined by fine qualities about our physiology, we don't know those fine qualities and we can never know them because they're too complicated. So it's the complexity gives the rise to unpredictability, which in effect makes us feel free. Makes us feel. I always feel like I could put a little more effort in.

54:16 Wes: Well, those are two different questions, right? I mean, in this, he doesn't try to reduce the question of free will to this question of whether we can know there's free will. One is not really reducible to the other. He does say that we can't know whether there's free will, and maybe that means we ought to act as if there's free will. That's fine, but it doesn't mean that the question of whether there's free will is reducible to that. He just says it's insoluble on strictly psychological grounds. Let me just read the part that I'm arguing for.

So the question of fact in the free will controversy is thus extremely simple. It relates solely to the amount of effort of attention which we can at any time put forth. Are the duration and intensity of this effort fixed functions of the object, or are they not? And before, just a little bit above that, he says the effort appears, in other words, not as a fixed reaction on our part which the object that resists us necessarily calls forth, but as what the mathematicians call an independent variable amongst the fixed data of the case. Our motives, our character.

So in other words, right, the data

55:16 Mark: that what we can know, it's not the full set of facts that's available for an omniscient being. It's the. The set of facts that we have

55:23 Wes: access to data that completely turns us into a kind of relativism that makes no sense. I understand he's a pragmatist, but what he's saying here is that the question of free will comes down to whether the amount of effort we can put into willing is a deterministic function of our character and the world and our motives and all that stuff, or whether, to quote him, it's not a determinant function of those other data, then in common parlance, our wills are free. So the data is just the given. He's not saying that the data are these psychological and it wouldn't make any sense if the data were these were our knowledge. Our knowledge is not something that can be having a deterministic effect here. It can't be the case that our wills are unfree just in case we know that our motives and character contributed or determined the act. That makes no sense.

56:10 Mark: He only mentions this independent variable twice fatalism, which conceives of effort clearly enough as an independent miracle that might come. A fourth dimension if it would come, but does not come, is a very dubious ally for determinism. So that's the first place. And then the second place is now, as I just said, it seems as if the effort were an independent variable, as if it might exert more or less of it in any given case.

56:32 Wes: Yeah, independent variable mean being outside of the causal deterministic framework.

56:38 Mark: Right?

56:38 Wes: Seems right. He's not arguing that there's such a thing as free will. He's just telling you what would have to be true for there to be such a thing.

56:45 Mark: Okay, well, maybe I'm reading this through the lens of his future pragmatism because I know his future pragmatism is that as far as you know, you can't predict what I'm going to do next. So therefore I have free will and that's all that's required pragmatically, to state that I have free will is to have it seem like it's an independent variable. And I think that he can easily argue and unless you have the brain scan so that we can somehow run a computer simulation of your brain and say this is what you're going to do next, then I mean, that would be an interesting question. Would that affect the pragmatic take on, you know, you thought you had free will, but once I provide you with this extra information that the computer simulation of your brain, then does that undermine it or does the fact that I'm delivering you this extra piece of information, you would just go against it?

57:34 Wes: Yeah, you're making whether or not I have free will depend on whether or not I know that I have free will.

57:40 Dylan: I thought that the content of the distinction was the distinction of effort and attention and it was an academic exercise about whether or not you want to call that free will or not. What I particularly like about it is it dodges the stupid ass arguments in free will about it being genuinely free and says, look, there's an activity of willing that involves attention and effort. And that's what I mean when I talk about having a will that isn't determined. It may not be completely free in the sense that it is operating solely outside of the activity of the physiological world. But just because it has some kinds of effect of it doesn't mean that it isn't an activity of me as an entity that is distinct in some ways from mere pinball reactions.

58:35 Mark: So this is what I wanted to point out. I had described in past episodes the sense of self as a stable ambiguity, and we see that here. So even in your talking about your spiritual self, in other words, your field of consciousness, you could see any given desire, like the Buddhist. You could point at it and say, that's not me. Or you could take responsibility for it and say, that is me. And so when you say, I don't know if I have quite enough effort here to power my way through and will what I know to be right, for instance, you could claim that that falling short, that lack of effort, the amount of effort that you seem to have available, you could interpret that again like a Buddhist as well, that's just something that's in my consciousness, that's not me.

In fact, maybe there is no me, and so in that way deny my moral responsibility for it. Or you could just say, well, if that's not me, I don't know what is, and I'm not going to be a Buddhist. I think obviously there is a self, and so this has got to be included in the self. And so, all right, I guess I'll take responsibility for that. Is that the same thing, even taking responsibility for it? To say I could have done it differently, I mean, it's almost. No, I really tried. I couldn't put forth the effort. But there's always this feeling that no matter how overwhelmed I felt, the fact that you still kind of feel like you could have overcome the being overwhelmed, right.

It's not literally like I was on a drug that paralyzed me and I couldn't move my limbs. It's a different feeling than that.

1:00:02 Dylan: He makes the point earlier that it doesn't even matter if you can't do it or not. The fact that you are trying to do it means that you have. Oh, here it is. This is in the section. The will is a relation between the mind and its ideas. The willing terminates with the prevalence of the idea. And whether the act then follows or not is a matter quite immaterial. So far as the willing itself goes. I will to write and the act follows I will to sneeze, and it does not. I will that the distant table slide over the floor toward me. And it does not. My willing representation can no more instigate my sneezing center than it can instigate the table to activity.

But in both cases it is as true and good willing as it was when I willed to write in a word. Volition is a psychic or moral fact, pure and simple, and is absolutely completed when the stable state of the idea is there. Doesn't it matter if you can't do it? As far as there being a will involved, sure.

1:00:59 Mark: Well, and the way you've described it, it doesn't even matter if it's ultimately free. That's ultimately. The thing that he's trying to rip apart here is that we think about will as the part of us that is free, but that's not essential. We can still think about will coherently as voluntary action and oppose that to involuntary action and still not have that metaphysically charged word free attached to it.

1:01:21 Dylan: Yeah, and I just think it's a dumbass understanding of the word free.

1:01:24 Wes: Anyway, he doesn't explicitly say these things. He doesn't say it doesn't matter.

1:01:30 Dylan: He does. I just quoted what I read was

1:01:31 Wes: a quote does not have to do with free will. He's just saying that will is our relationship to an idea. That doesn't mean. He's not even talking about free will there.

1:01:40 Mark: He's talking about potency of will.

1:01:42 Wes: He's talking about whether when you will something, it has to be whether we call it willing only if it results in an action that's completely neutral to the question of free will. It's like you could answer the free will question either way and still hold the same psychology about whether willing includes action or terminates in an idea.

1:01:59 Dylan: I'll just abdicate right now because I clearly have utter contempt for. For the question of free will being genuinely free. I think it is just absolutely bonkers stupid.

1:02:14 Wes: So my example of the whole compatibleist or reason responsive example didn't sway you? The idea that the freedom lies in the phenomenal because it's similar actually to what James will end up saying, even though I think it's different. But just the phenomenology of having an insight that leads to a decision just in the same way it might lead to a scientific discovery or a math proof isn't pointing to that insight, that subjective mental state there isn't that pointing to something genuinely free?

1:02:44 Dylan: I completely agree with that. But to me, that is the proper understanding of the word free. And what always gets combined in here is that somehow free has to be completely disentangled from any kind of connection to anything else.

1:02:57 Wes: Yeah, but I don't know of any philosophers who have ever argued that, though.

1:03:00 Mark: But that's why I was trying not to read that definition of freedom into James either. And Wes, you clearly were and are saying that if there was freedom, it would have to be independence from the causal chain.

1:03:12 Wes: James is not reading it into him. I am directly quoting what he said, which is that's why he's not saying something similar. He's not a compatibilist in that sense. He's saying that he is taking a harder stand. By the way, there are contemporary philosophers who argue the same thing. It's not completely incoherent. I think the stuff that Dylan is focusing on, and Mark, I guess you're focusing on it too, is the more important part, and that is the ethical importance of the phenomenon of effort. The last section, which is similar to my pointing to the phenomenology of insight for the people who are actual compatibilists, but instead of focusing on reason, responsiveness, he's focusing on amount of effort.

And I think really what he's saying here is bracket out the question of free will. What's most valuable about us as people? It sounds almost like a virtue ethics is we the true measure of our worth is our capacity to put in effort, regardless of whether that's free in some metaphysical sense. Bracket that out. That doesn't change anything. It doesn't change the fact that it's a standard, that it's the fundamental standard of our value as human beings. I totally agree with you guys on that and with James on that.

1:04:24 Mark: Finish us up, Seth.

1:04:25 Seth: So I gotta say I'm with Dylan on this one. I think what James. Well, I don't think this is what he's saying, and this is what he says. The outcome of the exercise of will, whatever that means, is going to be an idea. The only way that idea could not be free would be the resistance that the idea has in the context of other ideas and the flow of experience and habit. And so I think that's really all this amounts to in his conception. He's abdicating the notion of free will in some sort of extra psychological sense. Now, does that mean that there aren't ethical consequences, or there isn't some sense of ownership and responsibility and all that that we can know, but to somehow imbue it with a kind of transcendental ethical importance? I don't want to go back. Have we done an episode on free will?

1:05:23 Mark: I don't know that Seth was on it. Was that with Tamler?

1:05:26 Dylan: It seems familiar.

1:05:27 Mark: Freedom and responsibility now.

1:05:29 Seth: Well, when I had the debate here in Austin on free will, maybe I should find that video and post it made a very strong argument that the whole concept of free will is very much married to religious, the Western religious tradition. And that metaphysically it only makes sense if you buy into certain religious notions. And I feel like James is just saying, you know, again, this is the work of psychology. It's not ethics or metaphysics or anything like that, or even epistemology.

1:05:59 Mark: Yeah. So that's how I interpret this part that Wes is pointing at is. No, he's just saying that free will is independence from the causal order. I think he's saying this is the problem of free will as I have inherited it.

1:06:09 Dylan: Yes.

1:06:09 Mark: And this is what freedom would have to be according to those people. So he's going to throw that away, but says basically we can get everything we need in terms of ethics just out of the psychological by exactly this stuff that we're focusing on in the end here. That you could talk about virtue and yeah, maybe he could go on a Nietzschean rant and say the fact that I've left the theological notion of freedom behind has advantages and. But he doesn't give that. He doesn't get into social philosophy here and maybe he does that somewhere else. So we abandon the problem as is traditionally conceived, but yet we get to have all the moral goodies.

1:06:46 Wes: He doesn't say we're going to abandon the problem. He says it's not within the scope of psychology. He doesn't say when I. He describes the problem of free will that it's illegitimate to describe the problem this way. He says that this is actually a problem for metaphysics and this is the way metaphysics has to describe it. And metaphysicians actually ought to think about it. I think we all agree on the point that ethically, he thinks he doesn't need it.

1:07:08 Seth: Ethically, I think it's worth telling listeners to go read it and decide for themselves whether they're Alwanists or Caseyites.

1:07:18 Mark: Let's do some closings. Is there anything you haven't said yet about how much you love it?

1:07:22 Dylan: I think James is very, very readable and it's easy to find the places where you can skip over, but it's full of rich insights that are either applicable or easy to think through right now. So go read the book.

1:07:36 Wes: Yep.

1:07:37 Seth: Well, written, easy to read. It's one of those things that you read and you kind of go, huh,

1:07:42 Wes: Yeah, I guess so.

1:07:44 Seth: And then when you think and talk about it, it becomes substantially more complex, has a bit of antiquated. It has that kind of language of the birth of a discipline, a birth of a Wissenschaft. So there's words in there that obviously didn't shake out into the common language of psychology later on, but well worth the time. And really from an investment perspective, time and energy, it's a light investment for the quality of the return, which is

1:08:13 Mark: not how it felt prepping for some of these that I enjoyed reading it, but there's just so much of it. And then when I had to go back and take notes that I was just like, ugh. It's a strange combination of it being readable and fun and my finding it delightful. But in a certain way it's like a textbook. I would rather have it been a series of short, non encyclopedic, insightful articles. There's a reason why then later he writes, you know, the Will to Believe and he writes Pragmatism. And his sort of shorter form is an improvement, I think. But certainly this is a monumental work and I'm so glad that we finally got around to it.

And I'm really surprised at how much like I hope that Merleau-Ponty and Sartre are read some James I don't know that they did chronologically, it kind of lines up that they might have, but maybe it's just, you know, similarities between what James was thinking about and what Bergson was thinking about. Who those guys did read, I don't know. There's a very fruitful dialogue to be had between this text and phenomenology. Anything else, Wes?

1:09:18 Wes: No, I'm good.

1:09:20 Mark: Next time we are going to read Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963. We would love to hear what you think about this. What else you would like us to read? Email us@pelartialexamwithlife.com you can respond to us on the blog. You can join our Facebook group and respond to us there. You can follow us on Twitter, all that stuff. I want to remind you that Partially Examined Life 2018 wall calendars are still available. Check out partiallyexaminedlife.com store today's closing song is Join the Zoo Live Again by Craig Wedren from his new album Adult Desire. Hear my entertaining interview with Craig on Nakedly Examined Music Episode 15, available at nakedly examinedmusic.com thanks, guys, for making it to midnight 1am Good night, everybody.

1:10:06 Wes: Good night.

1:10:07 Seth: Good night.

1:10:23 Unknown speaker: You can't join the living, You can't join the zoo. I watch boy tomorrow. Mala haziru. Ah, staring at your face? Oh, promise everything after. You can join the zoo. Car wash door tomorrow. Mom's house room. Caught staring at that face? Oh, promise everything after. Sam. Over just be friends Sunlight right to pass. Let's be clothing for days Dinner jump right out driver eat the host. Early in the morning. Let me fill you in on something that was talked around and jump about last night Freezing the stuff and sink a pillar to a coffee call the doctor had to count your eggs right now. Live.