I'll chime in with my usual:
these dabates usually aren't particularly fruitful, as people begin to talk past one another. We need an operationalized definition of what it is to "will", but then what it is to do so "freely". I haven't arrived at any satisfactory answer to my own question, so I'll let others chime in. Provisionally, however, I will say that predictive indeterminacy of will doesn't seem sufficient to establish free willing.
azzazza?I said:
you are looking at your room. at a certain point you become aware that you are looking at your room. you become aware of, you know of, a you and the fact that it is looking at your room. you know that you are looking at your room. this meta-perspective is the transcending of the subject-object relation, and is what i call 'self-awareness'. it is a sort of observing of the observer himself. that escapes both the object itself, as well as the perciever. it is the awareness of your perspective. but what is this meta-observer? its impossible to say. it is both you and it is not you. it is you looking at yourself. this is a fundamental 'freedom' you have from yourself, characterized by a sort of 'non-being'. you take a distance, a step back from yourself. but into what exactly? a sort of 'nothingness'.
Sorry if I'm covering redundant stuff: I don't yet have the wherewithal to read this entire thread.
I like this formulation, but I also find it somewhat incomplete / imprecise.
What actually happens, concretely, for the investigating subject when she pops up a level of meta-awareness? I believe that the subject/object schism is re-carved, still retaining subject-object duality. Now, the object encompasses the prior complex of investigating subject and investigated object, the subject encompassing an investigator that takes the prior investigation (a prior self) as an object. We can see, then, that the investigator may pop-up an arbitrarily extendable number of levels of meta-investigation. In no case will the question of free will dissipate: it's still open to interpretation whether we should describe this process as determined, causal processes outside the scope of investigation determining shifts in what the investigator does (most crucially, which 'level' of abstraction she focuses on), or that the crucial point is that we can't form a body of causal laws which intelligibly describe how particular categories of phenomena external to the investigation cause particular shifts in awareness.*
My opinion (sans firm evidence) is that the body of processes determining these shifts in awareness (and thus structuring the non-dual space into which awareness plunges anew, structuring possible novel dualities) lies in the set of conditions of possibility that govern how investigation emerges in the first place. Per this picture, both these conditions of possibility for investigation and the space of possible investigations into which actual investigations launch defy the question of willing, as they inhere logically prior to characteristics which allow willing and freedom to become intelligible, namely temporality and clear division between what is possible and what actually transpires. More generally, the temporality and realization of the possible as actual mark the emergence of dualism, emerging out of the one/many blur, into the space of the one/many blur.**
Whether the willing that occurs is "free" is a matter of particular aspects of the observer/environment interaction (logically secondary to the 'space' of possibilities which structure this interaction but logically primary to either subject or object, as we come to know the two), these aspects necessarily perspectivally partial and in constant flux.
this freedom may be limited to awareness of perspective. but to deny this 'freedom' would be preposterous, for it is to deny the very awareness that comes to positing this position. without it, you couldn't say "im a determinist" for you cannot be aware of this fact. ie.: object: "determinist", subject: "i", transcendence of object-subject: "i am determinist."
Is this autonomy of awareness from object of awareness what people tend to mean when they describe someone 'willing' 'freely'? And do we at root agree, but just with differing foci?
ebola
*I believe that the problem is that the fruits of investigations establish intelligible laws governing objects of investigation, not laws governing the context which shapes this investigation.
**One problem that you may have noticed is that my ontological schematic is riddled with dualities, as I try to describe the non-dual. That is because I too take the character of a subject investigating an object as I write this, never fully capturing the object that I truly desire to aim at, the investigation itself.