Thanks for the clarification.

Nevertheless, isn't Kant making an assumption by saying there are "things in themselves"? This includes plurality, how do we know if there is such a thing?

Yes, that is my understanding too. That doesn't mean that positive noumena are impossible, just that we can't comprehend how they could exist, or even if they could exist at all, but the possibility of such a thing remains open.

Kant sometimes oscillates between the "thing-in-itself" and "things in themselves", and these, obviously, are different in an important respect, in that one presupposes individuation, the other does not.

When what's being discussed is far from clear, we should withhold trying to find a reference relation until we have a better idea of what kind of thing we are talking about.

Do we have in mind noumenon in a negative sense or in a positive sense? Are we to think of noumena in singular or in plural? Are we to think of them as grounding relations or mere epistemic postulates about the limits of reason?

All of these are hard questions, which merit discussion and clarification. Absent this, we may be acting somewhat prematurely in attempting to find a reference relation.

In what sense do you intend to define it? Real, in English, is an honorific term; if someone says to you "here's the deal" or "here's the real deal", or if they say, "this is the truth" or "this is the real truth", they aren't implying there are two kinds of deals or two kinds of truths, they are just emphasizing the word.

There are things in the world which have a certain appearance and utility, which we call "chairs" and use accordingly, likewise we do something similar for mathematical formulations, within a specific framework of understanding. Same with fictional entities, people, history and cities, etc.

The substantive question, it seems to me, is the issue of mind-independence, is the thing you are describing as "real", something which exists in the extra-mental world, or is it a solely a mental construction, with no external anchoring?

What do we measure knowledge with if not with our lifetime? There was no possibility of knowledge prior to birth, nor will there be after death.

I suppose, if forced to speculate, that if I really attempt to focus on what happened the few instances prior to the spark of consciousness arose, there was just total "darkness", for want of any word whatsoever.

If I extrapolate that state prior to being conscious, to a future state in which I will no longer be conscious, then I suppose the best "knowledge" I have, is that there will be "darkness" for a very long time.

Assuming there is no afterlife, or reincarnation and so on.

I have skimmed the essays a bit and have read one essay of his not directly related to physics per se, but related to the topic of "realism".

My own view is that his output tends to be more helpful to the moderately advanced student than to a lay educated audience. However, ymmv.

"But as for those other Objects of Cogitation, which we affirmed before to be in themselves neither the Objects of Sense, nor Objects of Fancy, but only things understood, and therefore can have no Natural and Genuine Phantasms properly belonging to them; yet it is true, notwithstanding that the Phantastic Power of the Soul, which would never willingly be altogether idle or quite excluded, will busily intend itself here also.

And therefore many times, when the Intellect or Mind above is Exercised in Abstracted Intellections and Contemplations, the Fancy will at the same time busily employ itself below, in making some kind of Apish Imitations, counterfeit Iconisms, Symbolical Adumbrations and Resemblances of those Intellectual Cogitations of Sensible and Corporeal things.

And hence it comes to pass , that in Speech , Metaphors and Allegories do so exceedingly please , because they highly gratify this Phantastical Power of Passive and Corporeal Cogitation in the Soul, and seem there by also something to raise and refresh the Mind itself, otherwise lazy and ready to faint and be tired by over - long abstracted Cogitations, by taking its old Companion the Body to go along with it, as it were to rest upon, and by affording to it certain crass, palpable, and Corporeal Images, to incorporate those abstracted Cogitations in, that it may be able thereby to see those still more silent and subtle Notions of its own, sensibly reflected to itself from the Corporeal Glass of the Fancy."

- Ralph Cudworth

The Secret History by Donna Tart

Second (and final, for a while) reading The True Intellectual System of the Universe by Ralph Cudworth

That's interesting, will have to wait and see how this pans out, but this is a promising avenue.

I can't guarantee you'll like it; some aspects can be subject to (probably) fair criticism.

It just hit me at the right time I suppose.

Spent three days reading:

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton.

That was a masterpiece.

It's been a good while since I've been engrossed in a book like that. Heck, I don't want to rush into my next book just to savor and think about what I just read.

Books like these are the reason literature is so fascinating, giving us a privileged peak into human nature.

Well this last offensive has been mentioned a few times, notably by Col. Macgregor, who has been pretty good in his predictions so far.

So it's not a surprise that NATO is also on the reaction, because if there is no big push from either side this summer, then we are in for an extremely long and ever more dangerous stalemate.

It's going to be a rather tense couple of months...

Nobody really knows right now what Prigozhin was really thinking, he says it was a protest of kinds. But is that the actual reason?

Maybe what you say is right, but then why stay in Belarus? Might take some time to figure out what was going on.

Haruki Murakami... — T Clark

He's fantasy or, magical realism. Not much sci-fi, a little in his Hard Boiled Wonderland...

Al Jazeera spoke to Daniel Hawkins, a journalist based in Moscow, who said that Yevgeny Prigozhin is still under investigation by Russian authorities for mutiny.

“Initially Putin said the charges will be dropped but that seems to be on the table again,” Hawkins said. “A lot will depend on the Kremlin’s response to his statement, and how that relationship will develop if there will be one at all.”

“[Prigozhin] said the whole incident was simply a demonstration of the weak spots of the Russian security forces, a demonstration of how – according to him – Russia’s so-called special military operation in Ukraine could have gone if given to the hands of the most professional fighting force in the world.”

But how exactly that would look like is hard to say, Hawkins said.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2023/6/26/russia-ukraine-live-news-shoigu-meets-troops-after-wagner-mutiny

Apparently this was meant as a kind of wake up call to the Kremlin. Strange way to do so...

Ayyye. We idealists, probably. :halo:

Ahhh, that was Penrose's idea. If I remember correctly, there are a few others that believe in similar things.

I think you would very much enjoy Cosmosapiens by John Hands, he goes over these theories, and a few different ones, other than the Big Bang Model and much, much more. Though not pop-sci, it's not too bad to read at all.

It's quite exciting to see the JWST shake up our model of Cosmology. We still need more and better analysis, but, something needs modification. Took longer than I expected, honestly.

All in all, very cool. :up:

Well, I would hope not. That would be outrageous if it were unethical or if somehow people could see our thoughts.

It's the one place in which we can see how far our ideas and intuitions go. Being a human being is not just about being good and moral and so wonderful, it's about dealing with the dark, disturbing and outright evil aspects of life.

Evil is just as much a reality as the good and requires exploration. So, no, I don't think it should follow that ethics applies to thoughts.

Predictions? I mean, so far as I know they (dark matter, dark energy) are postulates made in order to render serviceable the 5% of the universe we can make predictions of.

These six galaxies might end up having a solution and thus be rendered consistent with what we currently have, but there's beginning to be sufficient data that indicates that we are going to need to change our cosmology quite a bit. How drastic this will be is an open question.

Maybe we need to adjust the age of the universe a bit, or we discover that galaxies can be formed significantly easier than what we first thought. Or what you posted could turn out to be right, that would be most exciting.

Interesting times...

Welp, gotta see more professionals try and make sense out of this. Getting rid of dark matter and dark energy would be helpful.

If the universe is indeed eternal, then the question of our existence is less puzzling, given that in an infinite amount of time, almost anything can happen, and here we are.

It will be interesting to see how they fix these Six Galaxies that appear to be older than the Big Bang allows them to be, in terms of time for formation.

"Because although some analyses indicate that these six galaxies aren’t as massive as first thought, others suggest that they might be even bigger. This indicates that, depending on follow-up observations, we may yet have to remake cosmology – most likely by throwing new cosmic ingredients into the mix to explain the apparent paradox.

“It basically means you’re seeing galaxies before they have time to assemble,” says Charles Steinhardt, an astrophysicist at the Cosmic Dawn Centre in Denmark. “If this is really true, this does mean the standard model of cosmology is broken.”

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25834433-200-what-the-huge-young-galaxies-seen-by-jwst-tell-us-about-the-universe/

It's paywalled, unless you have a way around it.

This is a very good summary.

Thanks for sharing.

Do you see what he's doing there? He conflates two totally different problems. The problem of movement doesn't claim to have any logical issue, it's just a mystery, while the hard problem is a totally different animal. The hard problem claims to be a logical problem, not a mystery.

By raising empirical evidence over logic, Chomsky faces problems with the latter. So his only way is to strawman things, conflate terms, and remain in a grey area. This is exactly what he's doing.

If he were intellectually honest, he would say: yes, there might be logical issues with consciousness arising from non-consciousness, but we should still do what empirical evidence is telling us. Instead of that, he either denies them or conflate them. — Eugen

Yep, I am well aware that motion and consciousness are quite different, in terms of phenomena and emergence. But this issue here is of intelligibility.

I don't agree on consciousness being a logical problem, we don't know, how matter could give rise to consciousness, that is to say, within current science, we have no way of capturing experience and submitting it to experimental procedures, such as are used in biology or any other field.

That's not logical, that's conceptual.

And it's not only Chomsky, but also Raymond Tallis, Colin McGinn, Steven Pinker, but more importantly Descartes and Locke (and others) argue in a quite similar vein, each emphasizing different aspects of the "hard problem". It's a mystery too.

And it's fine if you think he is conflating something, but it is a whole different thing to imply that he is being intellectually dishonest.

He quotes Locke many times, when Locke says:

"We have the ideas of matter and thinking, but possibly shall never be able to know whether any mere material being thinks or no; it being impossible for us, by the contemplation of our own ideas, without revelation, to discover whether Omnipotency has not given to some systems of matter, fitly disposed, a power to perceive and think, or else joined and fixed to matter, so disposed, a thinking immaterial substance: it being, in respect of our notions, not much more remote from our comprehension to conceive that GOD can, if he pleases, superadd to matter a faculty of thinking,
than that he should superadd to it another substance with a faculty of thinking; since we know not wherein thinking consists, nor to what sort of substances the Almighty has been pleased to give that power, which cannot be in any created being, but merely by the good pleasure and bounty of the Creator."

(Chomsky's emphasis)

We would substitute "God" for "nature" and get the "hard problem". He says we don't know how consciousness arises from matter, even if we are sure that it does.

But he further adds that we don't understand how motion works, something that seems to be quite a deal simpler than consciousness.

In other words, he believes consciousness arises from non-consciousness via weak emergence. — Eugen

Yeah, he does, I even provided the Priestely quote which shows that.

He doesn't believe in strong emergence and what he calls radical or brute emergence is just a matter of our ignorance, not a real fact. — Eugen

There is something about the underlying properties which must give rise to the "higher order" phenomenon, but we don't know what it is. As I've said several times, we have theories in the case of liquids, we understand the theories, not the phenomenon. Unless you say that theories are the phenomenon, that's a different conversation.

No, strong emergence is not bonkers, it happens all the time, with almost everything.

But, I think we've exhausted what can fruitfully be said on this topic - at least I have. Maybe someone else can engage with you on the topic.

Thanks for the conversation though, it was interesting.

I don't personally recall him using that term ("weak emergence) to describe anything, and the reason he even used the term "radical emergence" at all, was to address a point raised by Galen Strawson. He doesn't use these terms.

He uses the word "reduction" and speaks about it in relation to chemistry being reduced to physics, in the quantum theoretic revolution.

But he does not speak nor think about the issue in terms of weak or strong reduction, unless explicitly talking about it in relation with Strawson's arguments.

See page 186 of the article I sent.

There's nothing in matter that suggests consciousness, true, at the same time, there is nothing in matter that suggests lack of consciousness. It's as Bertrand Russell says (whom Chomsky agrees with here) we don't know enough about the nature of matter to say if it like or unlike the world of mind.

He'd say the case of liquids is the same as consciousness, you disagree and call it weakly emergent. OK, then you disagree with him.

I suppose this would be my last recourse: this interviewer has quite similar concerns to you, maybe you'd get something out of it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLuONgFbsjw&t=3089s

If that doesn't help a bit, I don't know what else could help.

The idea that consciousness is somehow special in some sense that makes it radically different from other parts of nature.

He takes it that all aspects of nature should occasion the same astonishment as consciousness does.

I didn't add that liquidity would also be above its constituents, or life, or bipedalism. So it's either property pluralism, or it's natural monism, which is studying aspects of nature. While the aspects are different as life is different from liquids, it's all a study of nature.

But now it becomes terminological...

I'd guess he'd say something to the effect of: "yes" on consciousness being over and above its constituents, though it wouldn't be the only property that fits that demand.

No on property dualism, he calls himself a "methodological monist." If you want more information on what that view entails, you might want to read some chapters in his New Horizons in The Study of Language and Mind.

Yeah, we are going to continue running in circles given how we define and think about "strong emergence" and "weak emergence".

So it's best if you ask him.

Heavy under the example you provided.

If you are saying it is a fundamental property, then it's a fundamental property of matter. That's not emergent.

I believe you can email him at: nchomsky3atgmaildotcom

I mean, you are asking several times if he believes in radical emergence, I've said yes numerous times.

Alternatively, you can just email him yourself, he usually answers very quickly.

If by irreducible you mean that these properties are not to be found in the isolated molecules, then I believe he would.

I've got an idea. Let's say the brick is fundamental and its only fundamental property is mass. No brick is a wall, but 100 bricks form one. The wall has the property of being heavy. No brick is heavy, but the wall is. Surprising, but not really. The wall is nothing more than bricks, and ''heavy" is nothing more than mass. Liquidity is the same, only that it is more complex. But the most important thing is that they're both 100% weakly emergent.
Now let's say that the wall, besides being heavy, it is also conscious. And even its consciousness arises because of mass, it is not reducible to mass, it is a totally new property.

So let's assume mass is all there is to know about bricks. So we've defined bricks. Now we would conclude that mass is the secret ingredient to consciousness, but consciousness is not mass, it's something totally different.

Now let's take this one step further.
2049 - physicists find a new property called X, where X is NOT subjective experience. Now, they're able to make a complete theory of quantum and relativity, and everything works in physics. Everything except... consciousness. There are still obnoxious philosophers who state that X and the other properties of what we call matter don't explain consciousness.
Now, what would Chomsky say?
A. Consciousness is 100% reducible to X, mass, electrical charge, etc., therefore weakly emergent
B. Obviously, consciousness is strongly emergent in the way Eugen understands strong emergence, i.e. irreducible property — Eugen

Ok, I think I understand what you say somewhat better, not unlike Dennett's views. I don't happen to think that heavyness is trivial in an obvious sense. But let's put that aside.

Consciousness is somehow different than these other things for some reason that is not explained. I would add that heaviness would be just as strange as consciousness on this view, as Chomsky says about motion.

Here is a crucial quote about motion:

"History also suggests caution [about assuming that consciousness is uniquely difficult]. In early modern science, the nature of motion was the “hard problem.” “Springing or Elastic Motions” is the “hard rock in Philosophy,” Sir William Petty observed, proposing ideas resembling those soon developed much more richly by Newton. The “hard problem” was that bodies that seem to our senses to be at rest are in a “violent” state, with “a strong endeavor to fly off or recede from one another,” in Robert Boyle’s words. The problem, he felt, is as obscure as “the Cause and Nature” of gravity, thus supporting his belief in “an intelligent Author or Disposer of Things.” Even the skeptical Newtonian Voltaire argued that the ability of humans to “produce a movement” where there was none shows that “there is a God who gave movement” to matter, and “so far are we from conceiving what matter is” that we do not even know if there is any “solid matter in the universe.” Locke relinquished to divine hands “the gravitation of matter towards matter, by ways, inconceivable to me.”

pp. 178-179

On Chomsky's view, not only would consciousness be "strongly emergent" so would heaviness. Just like the quote I provided through Priestley.

These are different intuitions, even if you say they're not. You say "...[t]he wall is nothing more than bricks, and ''heavy" is nothing more than mass. Liquidity is the same, only that it is more complex."

"Nothing more" implies that it's all perfectly obvious. And it's also obvious that these properties are nothing more than bricks doing what they do.

So liquidity is "nothing more" than molecules interacting. Ok. You call this weakly emergent. I think it's strongly emergent, and I think Chomsky would agree that it's strongly emergent.

which is rather silly in my opinion because there's nothing puzzling about liquids. — Eugen

I mean, if you take that attitude literally, we wouldn't have modern science. The reason why Newton discovered gravity, is because he was puzzled as to why apples fall to the ground instead of levitating or going up to the sky.

It was literally this trivial - once people started being puzzled by trivial things, we got modern science. If Galileo was not puzzled as to why we think heavier objects fall faster to the ground than light objects, he wouldn't have bothered to do the experiments showing that this assumption was false.

So, it may not be surprising to you, but to others it is.

It seems to me Chomsky denies the possibility of consciousness being fundamental on the basis of empirical evidence. So he doesn't care if for instance panpsychism makes perfect sense from a logical point of view, he will still dismiss it because there is no empirical evidence for atoms being conscious. — Eugen

Quoting Joseph Priestley, Chomsky says:

"Priestley then considers the claim that mind “cannot be material because it is influenced by reasons.” To this he responds that since “reasons, whatever they may be, do ultimately move matter, there is certainly much less difficulty in conceiving that they may do this in consequence of their being the affection of some material substance, than upon the hypothesis of their belonging to a substance that has no
common property with matter”—not the way it would be put today, but capturing essentially the point of contemporary discussion leading some to revive panpsychism. But contrary to the contemporary
revival, Priestley rejects the conclusion that consciousness “cannot be annexed to the whole brain as a system, while the individual particles of which it consists are separately unconscious.” That “A certain
quantity of nervous system is necessary to such complex ideas and affections as belong to the human mind; and the idea of self, or the feeling that corresponds to the pronoun I,” he argues, “is not essentially different from other complex ideas, that of our country for example.” Similarly, it should not perplex us more than the fact that “life should be the property of an entirely animal system, and not the separate parts of it” or that sound cannot “result from the motion of a single particle” of air... That seems to be a reasonable stance."

- p. 193

Weak emergence: new properties appear, but they are 100% reducible to more fundamental properties.
Strong emergence: new properties appear, and they are new in the real sense, they are irreducible to any other properties.

So forgive me for repeating the same question over and over again. Does Chomsky believe in what I call strong emergence? — Eugen

I don't understand reduction then. If you are arguing that liquidity is "reducible" to molecules, you mean to say that liquid arises from molecules? And this is weakly emergent because our theories describe the phenomenon?

So, maybe an example of weak emergence that is not liquidity would be heat, right? Heat is just particles moving extremely rapidly, and the faster they move the hotter the object is, while conversely, the slower they move, the colder an object is.

If this is what have in mind as a new property that is fully reducible, no, I don't think it is weakly emergent. It doesn't help that we don't know what a particle is, literally:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-a-particle-20201112/

To answer your question:

Yes, he does.

I'll add the final caveat (based on what I've read, talked with him, etc.), there obviously must be something in the constituent parts that gives rise to new properties: there is something about the constituent elements of the world that give rise to liquidity, heat, even life, but we don't know what they are.

Finally, I would add, that it could be that we have different intuitions. I agree with Chomsky on these topics, but he could be wrong, and you could be correct. Or maybe you have better or more scientific intuitions. If so, then that's fine.

"Knows" in English, can be misleading, I think "understanding" is less ambiguous (not that it makes it perfectly clear, but, maybe less confusing.)

If we had the capacity to understand all the properties of particles, then I think emergence would not be surprising. But "understanding" needs to include intuitions if we are going to say that we understand the phenomena.

Our built-in cognitive capacities are mechanistic: if we see a billiard ball hitting another one, we expect one ball to be the cause of movement of the other, until the other ball loses force.

If we kick a football (soccer) ball, we expect it to go a certain trajectory and then fall, because that's what balls do.

If I take the lid off a boiling pan, steam rises because it's going to its natural place, kind of like a big machine.

That's what we understand intuitively, it doesn't puzzle us to see steam rising or billiard balls stopping, etc.

Of course, this is not what is actually happening, the ball billiard ball stops because of friction, objects fall because of gravity, etc.

The actual explanations is science, not folk psychology or intuition. If we had a different cognitive constitution (maybe an advance alien species) gravity, friction and even liquidity could be intuitive to us and we could also have a theory that explains the intuitions, that happens to apply to the external world.

So, to answer your question yes, I think so in principle, but probably beyond us.

I know the video very well, he didn't say consciousness was emergent, he just said radical emergence was real. I was very intrigued by this part because it seemed to me that after RLK argued that water wasn't radical emergence, Chomsky didn't defend his view but rather he ran away abruptly using the movement analogy. I think it's a soft spot for Chomsky, it seemed that way for me. — Eugen

Radical emergence is the idea that a new property arises which was not evident in its constituent parts. Some people like to say that since we understand the theory in which molecules turn into liquids, then it isn't radical emergence.

Chomsky can follow the theory and understands it, but doesn't see how particles could lead to liquidity. In a similar, if not significantly more complicated manner, a physicist can understand quantum entanglement, but the phenomenon doesn't make sense.

I know you asked, but it's not entirely possible to do away with intuitions. If we could see how particles combined in a certain way could lead to liquidity, then we'd understand the theory and the phenomenon. It's the phenomenon which is puzzling, not the theory.

So mind is strongly emergent, but it is lower than the brain, the reason being that we discover brains through consciousness. Am I right? — Eugen

That was a very poor explanation on my part, happens when I get carried away. What I should have said is that "saying consciousness is reducible to brains... doesn't say much in our current state of knowledge", instead of saying "doesn't make any sense". Thanks for pointing it out and letting me clarify.

We know that consciousness arises in specific configurations of matter, but not in our pinkies or noses. It's in our brains. We lose a limb; we still think rather well. We lose our heads, we don't think much, etc.

In our current state of understanding, if we say that consciousness is simply brain activity, then we are leaving out almost everything we value about consciousness, including emotions, colors, music, reflection, etc. Our studies of the brain say very, very little about these phenomena so far.

Chomsky is following Russell's "Three grades of certainty", in which Chomsky seems to agree with Russell, that what we are most confident about are out own conscious experience, following that we are confident about what other people say about their own conscious experience - if they're being honest. Following that we are confident about our theories about the world.

It's in this sense that, as Russell points out, when a neuroscientist is looking at a patient's brain, they are actually having an experience of looking at another person's brain, it's not as if the scientist can get out of his body to study a patient's brain, in a "view from nowhere".

A brain, in this respect, is a construction we postulate to make sense of our anatomy. It doesn't mean brain aren't real or that they're "only in our minds", but that, neuroscience is part of our capacity for formulating a science.

That would be more accurate. But there's a lot to add as well.

1. He doesn't care much about the logical arguments in the debate between those who claim consciousness is fundamental and those who don't because he believes science (and not logic) should answer this question. When science tells us what are the properties of what we call matter, then we will have the answer. — Eugen

I'm not clear on what you have in mind here. In the video, he was interpreting what Galen Strawson's view are, and he takes it that Strawson argues that if we want to find out what a mind is, you need to find out more about the nature of the world, because the mind is a part of the world.

He doesn't believe consciousness is fundamental, as opposed to Strawson, he sees no good evidence for panpsychism. The arguments for it are interesting, but not persuasive to him.

2. He has the intuition that there is nothing in the current way of doing science that would ever give us a fully satisfactory answer.
Therefore, it seems we're stuck with a mystery. — Eugen

That's more or less accurate. I think he'd say that we currently have no theory of consciousness, but we could have one, one day. But even if we do, it wouldn't do away with the issue of the misleadingly called "hard problem", because as Locke pointed out, we don't understand how matter could lead to consciousness, even if we are confident that that's what consciousness is, matter specifically arranged.

V. You didn't answer my initial question, or I simply missed your answer. So...
Does Chomsky believe consciousness is one of the three (fundamental, weakly, strongly emergent), or he believes there are many other options that our logic cannot comprehend? — Eugen

As for this question, I don't think he distinguishes much between these views. Radical emergence has become a problem recently in philosophy, these new properties, of liquidity or heat just arose from the phenomena, they're emergent. But if you call it strong or weak is mostly terminological.

As I interpret him, if pushed, he'd probably say that he takes emergence to be "radical" or "brute", in that new properties constantly arise from parts which seem to lack the new property in isolation. He'd also say that calling it "radical" would likely be misleading, because it's normal science.

We do the best we can to construct theories from these new properties.

I know that was long, and I probably left something out, but I needed to clarify a badly phrased reply. Obviously if you want more clarifications or have doubts, let me know, I'll try and help.

Oh sure. And as suggested by you implicitly, much of this depends on what one takes "God" to imply or cover. If it is belonging to the Abrahamic tradition, then obviously giving medicine to a sick person would be contrary to God's plan.

Of course, if one takes God to be somewhat akin to what Plotinus did, then medicine is not a problem.

You and Paine made me have a mini panic (don't worry these are good) and I started reading (skimming to be honest) some of the classics on "free will", Locke and Hume, but I thought Locke's take on the will to be quite more intuitive (if not reasonable) than Descartes.

The difficulties which one can find in his philosophy, is decently covered in the SEP.

To continue in the Cartesian tradition in a contemporary setting, we'd have to turn "God" into nature, and proceed from that, it seems to me.

All I'm saying is that I perceive that in a single mental act, or object of knowledge, there is more at play than the will.

I don't have anything against the will, nor is it trivial or unimportant or of little consequence.

If you want to add something, please do, you certainly know Descartes very well.

I'll read whatever you say, as there is plenty more here to consider.

↪Manuel
Maybe it would help if you gave a definition of the will as expressed by a philosophy that rings true for you. The concept has been approached many different ways and those ways have prompted very different 'psychological' perspectives.

I am reading Descartes as saying will is freedom of choice rather than him speaking of " having freedom of the will. The latter suggests there could be an unfree will. In this context, I read that as a contradiction in terms. — Paine

I'd define will as the ability to do or not to do something, this can range from trivial things like lifting a finger, to participating in protests and everything in between.

Hmmm. For Descartes having will at all is freedom of choice, I don't have much of an issue with that definition, save minor caveats than needn't be raised.

I suppose I unconsciously had Schopenhauer in mind, as when he says "Man can do what he wills, but cannot will what he wills." But he was a determinist.

I think that D is saying it will always help in making better choices but the inclusion of 'divine grace' in the statement is important too. We did not give ourselves freedom of choice nor what is our Good. The freedom of choice is a condition discovered through the limits of our intellect:

Were I always to see clearly what is true and good, I would never deliberate about what is to be judged or chosen.
— ibid. Fourth Meditation page 38 — Paine

That's a very thorny issue. It enters into the whole "causa sui" debate, of whether it is possible for one to be the cause of one's action. If the will is free, as I think it is, then it's possible.

Now, if my definition is not too problematic, then we can do, or not do something. With the intellect we judge, discern, reason, suppose, contemplate, compare, distinguish, evaluate, consider, combine, etc., etc.

That seems to be quite larger in scope than doing or not doing something. Granted, the latter is very important, no doubt about that.

Interesting replies.

My concern and interest here specifically is in the claim that the will is broader than the intellect. I'm questioning if that follows. In as much as we can (which is not trivial) differentiate mental faculties "the will" from "the intellect", it either is the case that the will is broader, or it isn't.

Then again, it could be that the distinction made between the two today can't be made too explicit.

That there are enormous consequences from having freedom of the will, (unless you are a determinist), is clear, we just look at the development of history.

I could very well be hyper-focusing on a topic that deviates from the goal of the Meditations. But again, my issue here is narrow.

It's a different thing if some of you believe that what Descartes said is correct. If it is, then that's fine. I wouldn't want this to be an impediment to the larger discussion.

The "increase in natural knowledge" increases our power and effect upon the world. — Paine

Missed this in my last reply. Sure, I don't debate or doubt that. My question is, do all aspects of natural knowledge play a role in the will?