'The Organization of Conscious States ' hackernoonbooks projectgutenberg
This is really the way in which the defenders of free will understand it; and they assert that when we perform an action freely, some other action would have been "equally possible." On this point they appeal to the testimony of consciousness, which shows us, beyond the act itself, the power of deciding in favour of the opposite course. Inversely, determinism claims that, given certain antecedents, only one resultant action was possible.
If this symbolism represents the facts, the activity of the self has always tended in one direction, and determinism results. If I glance over a road marked on the map and follow it up to a certain point, there is nothing to prevent my turning back and trying to find out whether it branches off anywhere. But time is not a line along which one can pass again.
Hence it is a question devoid of meaning to ask: Could or could not the act be foreseen, given the sum total of its antecedents? For there are two ways of assimilating these antecedents, the one dynamic the other static.
The determinist argument that psychic phenomena are subject to the law "same antecedents, same consequent." Thus understood, the relation of causality is a necessary relation in the sense that it will indefinitely approach the relation of identity, as a curve approaches its asymptote.
Prefiguring, as having an idea of a future act which we cannot realize without effort, does not involve necessary determination. But the sundering of these two ideas is an accomplished fact in the natural sciences. The physicist may speak of forces, and even picture their mode of action by analogy with an inner effort, but he will never introduce this hypothesis into a scientific explanation. Even those who, with Faraday, replace the extended atoms by dynamic points, will treat the centres of force and the lines of force mathematically, without troubling aboutforce itself considered as an activity or an effort.
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