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Jochen and Nick- I don't have any answers on this one, but I do have a couple of observations. 1) I don't understand what Nick means when he says : I doubt that I am conscious and that my consciousness affects my acts.I sympathize with the feeling, but I don't understand. In particular who the "I" is who is doing the doubting and whether "doubting" is a conscious act or not. 2) I appreciate Jochen's attempts to reduce the mystery of conscious action into it's (perhaps) more tractable components, but somehow I feel like you are cutting the head off of a Hydra in the process. As a young child (<10 yrs) I would lie in the grass staring at the clouds on lazy summer days until I felt compelled to get up and do something else. At that point, the habit of laying and contemplating would be deep enough that I would find myself in an interesting "loop" of "deciding to get up, but not doing it. I would (deliberately) think very hard about getting up yet would never quite find the connection between the decision and the action. I would deliberately search for the connection between the conscious thought "I shall get up now"with the action "getting up" and the very introspection would prevent the connection best I could tell. It would get so "bad" that eventually I would have to play a mental trick on myself and quit thinking about getting up. At that point, I would simply "get up" and the loop would be broken. This anecdote might explain why I am sympathetic with both Nick and Jochen, yet am significantly unsatisfied with either discussion. Carry on! - Steve |
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