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Subject: Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion on Walker Percy

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  • From: Ken Armstrong <armstron AT ohiou.edu>
  • To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" <percy-l AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Conscious Will
  • Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 07:48:45 -0400

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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