| | Here are a few more thoughts on the subject:
First I want to make it absolutely clear that I believe that there are no causeless (i.e., unmotivated) actions, and it is my belief that for man to initiate any conscious action, that action must be motivated by something. Recapping, I believe that as humans, we develop hierarchies of values which are concepts of varying complexity that embody our understanding of what is good and bad for us. We then establish goals which are another specie of concept that unite one or more of the previously integrated values with a plan of action for the achievement of the value(s). We can then consult these goals and, at a given point in time, select one or more of them to function as the motive in a decision to initiate action. Are our actions now casually necessitated and unavoidable as a consequence of our values and goals, or do we still retain the complete exercise of free-will over our actions under all circumstances? In other words, right up until the moment of actually initiating action, regardless of the conceptual content of our value hierarchy and despite having formulated one or more goals, do we retain control in deciding whether or not to act? My answer is yes. Values, by way of goals, may motivate, but are insufficient to initiate action. It still requires a conscious act of will to translate a goal into an action; to traverse the gulf between intention and enterprise.
The form that this free-will takes is by way of choice. We decide whether or not to act in service of a particular goal and we do that by selecting between a variety of possible goals (e.g., motives). Take Bill's example of a dieter who is faced with the choice of eating a piece of cake. I agree with Bill that there are multiple possible goals in play, two of which are: (A) remain on the diet and achieve the health benefits of reducing one's weight or (B) eat the cake and enjoy the eating experience. Each possible course of action has desirable benefits (values) at the expense of others not then achieved. Before the dieter can act, he must choose which of the goals he prefers at that moment, selecting one which will act as the motive for his actions - or as Bill says, the dieter may "reevaluate his priorities". There is nothing in the value of healthy dieting or in the value of tasty satisfaction that determines which action will be taken. That remains a matter of free choice. The same analysis applies to Bill's example of the applicant for graduate school facing a multiple-choice test question, knowing that B is the correct answer. Bill says that you cannot choose another answer given your desire to do as well as possible on the test. But what if you choose instead to be contrary and always select a wrong answer - possibly because you want to make a point about having free will! Then you will select any answer other than B. Getting into graduate school may be an important goal, but it is not the only possible goal, and a choice is available. Of course, Bill will likely respond that this is all well and good, but given a specific set of circumstances leading up to the moment when we are faced with the choice of which goal to pursue, we will be causally determined by those preceding circumstances to always make the same choice - so the appearance of choice is actually only an illusion. I am going to skip past this for a moment, but will return to it below.
In post #147 Jon says:
> The only thing to be said about free will metaphysically is that it exists as the
> power to focus one's mind and grasp facts of reality--or to unfocus and evade it.
I disagree. While the free choice to focus or defocus is the most basic or fundamental choice available to us, it is certainly not the only one. As we see in Bill's examples, selecting between a variety of goals in order to decide which course of action to take is also free and it is an evaluative process that can (and should) be made in the context of full mental focus and clarity. No matter how closely you look at the options available to the dieter, there is nothing to be found in the values or the goals of the two possibilities that explains how the final action of eating or not eating the cake occurred. That is because the free choice is a condition outside of, and in addition to, the goals themselves. Previously, when I spoke of the ability to act against or contrary to one's values, I was being imprecise. What I meant was that in a situation where multiple choices are possible, then it is possible to choose to act against any particular value one my have by selecting another goal in support of a different value which will then act as a motivator for an action which could be seen as contrary to the initial value.
So yes, ultimately, when we act, we do so by choosing to act in service of some particular goal, and I agree that there is a linkage between the underlying value, the intermediate goal and the resulting action that is undeniable. Therefore, I agree with much of what both Bill and Jon have been saying. But I do believe that both of them make a mistake in not acknowledging the nature of choice as an act of free-will, and the roll it plays in conscious human action.
Additionally, I think there is too much focus on the issue of focus! For the moment, leaving behind the question of how the focusing mechanism operates in our pre-conceptual state shortly after birth, I think that the same process that I describe above applies to our most basic decision to focus our awareness. I believe that, in the most general case, men develop a value (to varying degrees) of desiring "to understand" things. Then a related goal is established which encompasses the knowledge that in order to achieve the "understanding", we must act by "thinking" which entails the need to "focus". Evasion is the desire to not understand, which of course leads to the act of defocusing. This goal of "focusing in order to think in order to understand" can then motivate us in deciding to act to increase our level of awareness. So, while focusing may be the most fundamental action we can take, there is nothing particularly special about it. We choose to focus ultimately to gain understanding, just as we choose to diet in order to become or remain healthy.
While thinking about this entire discussion I had one other observation regarding the term "value" which I found extremely intriguing. Often, when we speak of values as I have been doing above, we are talking about a mental concepts that represent some aspect of reality. However, when we consider Rand's formulation that "a value is that which one acts to gain or keep", here "value" is not referring to the concept, but to the reality which that concept represents. For example, we don't act to gain or keep our concept of health, we act to gain or keep our actual health. Often, this distinction is irrelevant as there should be a one-to-one correspondence between the mental construct and that which it represents, but in a discussion such as this one, the distinction is very meaningful because the thing that we act to gain or keep is not the same thing that motivates us!
Animals that operate on the perceptual level of consciousness react directly with the external world and are directly motivated by it. When an animal see a predator, there is no intervening concept of "predator" to contemplate, no resulting goal formulated and no process of selecting between a variety of goals in deciding how to act. The animal simply gauges the perceptual facts available to it and reacts to them with a response. If Bill's idea about actions ultimately being casually necessitated by preceding circumstances turned out to be true, then it might apply to animals operating on the perceptual level.
Humans, on the other hand, operate on a conceptual level and do create a mental representation of reality upon which they can reflect. Because of this, we garner the opportunity to consider possible scenarios, project different courses of action with different possible outcomes, and thereby construct goals which can motivate us. It is the conceptual nature of human consciousness that gives rise to free will. Without having the scientific background to construct a real theory of this process, I nevertheless conjecture that it is the immaterial nature of conceptual thought as a part of our consciousness, that gives rise to our capacity of free will, freeing it from the bonds of determinism. With the rise of the ability to think about cause, effect, the future and oneself, without regard to direct external circumstances, man's mind gains the ability to set it's own course. Therefore, I believe that were it possible to place a human in the same set of circumstances on multiple occasions, there is no guarantee that they would necessarily act identically in each case, because the internal functioning of their consciousness is not determined by those circumstances.
Regards,
--
Jeff
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