Brian O’Shaughnessy’s first concern in The Will is to determine what the conceptual limits on the will are. These limitations break down into two categories: limitations on what can be a willing and limitations on what can be willed. “Willing the movement of extra-bodily objects”, were it to be impossible, falls into the second category. O’Shaughnessy’s first inclination is to claim that it is indeed impossible to will the movement of an extra-bodily event. However, he believes this natural inclination is just a consequence of the fact that we don’t understand the meaning of claiming to will the movement of an extra-bodily object. Being “in a muddle”, we reject the notion. However, to get more solid answer to the question Is willing the movement of an extra-bodily object conceptually impossible?, O’Shaughnessy engages in a series of thought experiments and arguments to outline more the meaning of a claim to will such a movement.
In service of this, O’Shaughnessy offers a series of descriptions, α through ζ. Each one attempts to describe a willing of an extra-bodily object. Case γ illuminates one of the core problems of willing the movement of extra-bodily objects. In (γ), whenever a particular agent says, “Move” to an object, the object moves. Furthermore, he knows that it will move. When we ask him how he knows, he replies “I just know”. His knowledge is immediate, lacking a mediating element. In the previous case β, the agent knew through a kind of trial and error. Surely (γ) comes closer to describing our situation with bodily willings than does (β). However, there is still a problem with the description of knowledge in (γ).
The problem with this description of knowledge hinges on the ‘just’ in “I just know”. “Just” has a subtly different meaning here that prevents (γ) from being analogous to a bodily willing. The first distinction between “justs” is that of intuitive versus occult “just knowings”. The knowledge of intuitive just knowings have grounds which are unavailable at the moment to the speaker. However, occult just knowings have no such grounds. They can never become self-conscious knowings-in-a-way, like intuitive knowings might. Both case (γ) and bodily actions seem to fall under occult knowings, so that will not help us in looking for a distinction. However, the distinction we are looking for is near by. While both types of knowledge are “irremediably immediate” in their groundings, only bodily actions, and the knowledge of them, are explicable. There is a clear causal chain that explains how bodily movements occur, and presumably also causes the knowledge of them in some way. Even though this knowledge is immediate and groundless, it still has a cause. This is more than can be said for (γ).
An even bigger problem with these examples of extra-bodily willing is that there is no act-trigger. Even if O’Shaughnessy were to grant that somehow someone could come up with a case in which the knowledge of the movement of an extra-bodily object was exactly analogous to the knowledge of a bodily movement, he would still object to the lack of an act-trigger. What is an act-trigger? It is a change in the agent that is the cause or related to the cause of the movement which he immediately knows. It seems to be closely related, although perhaps not identical, to an intention. The basic idea is that there has to be some power line, some connection between the object and the agent for there to be a willing. Otherwise, the agent is just a mystic, a fortune-teller of sorts.
The third difficulty that arose in considering these cases is the lack of feeling. O’Shaughnessy is baffled by the idea of someone lacking all feeling in a limb, yet being able to move it, write with it, and, all the while, know what it was doing. Our immediate knowledge of our bodily actions seems to be contingent on having feeling in the limb that we are moving. The essential problem here is not that one lacks knowledge of limb position by lacking feeling in it. For the man with the anesthetized limb could look at it and know its location in space with great precision. It is the feeling-based immediate awareness that is essential to a willing.
We have progressed in our evaluation of the claim to will the movement of an extra-bodily object. We are in possession of three clear reasons why such a claim is impossible. In all the cases of willing the movement of an extra-bodily object, the agent has a different kind of knowledge than does an agent who wills a bodily movement. Although both are immediate and ungrounded, the knowledge of agent who wills a bodily movement is explicable through a cause. In all the cases examined, the agent who wills the movement of an extra-bodily object does not have an active internal change that causes the external change in some way. He lacks a power line to the extra-bodily object. Finally, in cases of willing the movement of extra-bodily objects, the agent lacks feeling in the object and this makes being aware (in a technical sense) of its movements impossible. Here, then, are three characteristics of action that all bodily movements share and all extra-bodily movements lack. We are closer to a description of the necessary conditions for an object to be able to be the object of a willing.
2 comments:
The paper accurately and concisely explains the three difficulties O'Shaughnessy faces. There is only one thing that I would have liked to see that is not present. In the second and third obstacle descriptions I feel that it would have been helpful to use either one of O'Shaughnessy's cases or a case of your own to relate the issue to. The difficulties described in the paper are supposed to be the difficulties faced in the series of cases O'Shaughnessy presents and in the second and third problems you did not describe the case that the difficulty relates to specifically and how. Despite this, the descriptions remain accurate and comprehensive.
I was under the impression that the presence, rather than the absence, of a distinct triggering act in extra-bodily willing was the problem. If I’m getting it right, O’Shaughnessy’s power line means that a successful willing is both a psychological and physical event at once, rather than a bodily event that answers to a distinct psychological call. I am also unsure about the application of the occult/intuitive distinction, to bodily willing. Bodily willing can be explicated through mechanism, but it can’t be known in a way, so it seems like kind of an in-betweener.
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