John Smyth indicates that my essays stimulated his thinking and acting to write his essay “Free Will is an illusion”. I am delighted if this is so and flattered that someone has seen my writing as valuable enough to create stimulating ideas as a response. I am also stimulated and frankly impressed with the creative thinking and powerful analogies and metaphors that he uses to put forth his proposals. They are pushing me to think in new directions and more deeply.

This current response represents some of my first, quick reactions.

I might sit in my easy chair and experience “thirst”—my throat and tongue feel dry, I have an image of a cool glass of water from the pitcher in my refrigerator and anticipate how good it would feel going down. I also remember that I have had kidney stones and I have had very broad and deep advice that I should drink more than ½ a gallon of water every day and I am already behind for the day. I feel some fear at the thought of the pain that those kidney stones have created for me. And yet, I am in the midst of reading a very interesting essay and I experience a reluctance to stop reading and get up out of my chair and go to the kitchen for the water. I have a clear experience of choice (that is as “real” for me as the experience of the dryness of what I think of as my throat). I can get up or not, I can will my body to move or not. My experience is that it is up to me. I am, in a certain sense, in this moment, “free” to choose to move or not move. (Simply speaking, I may decide that waiting another five minutes will not be more painful than I can endure, nor too injurious to my health and that finishing the essay without interruption is important to me so I choose to get the drink of water in a few minutes instead of now).

I believe that it is important for me, in my Human Existence, to have that experience of choice. I don’t think this experience is illusory (or not what I think it is or perceive it to be) and I think it would diminish what it means to be Human not to have a psychology that includes this choosing, this “Willing” as a “reality”. The fact that I don’t always have choices even when I think I do, or that I can internally choose and then fail to carry out the action that I have chosen, does tell me something about the nature of Willing, but it does not make the primary experience illusionary.

I agree that each of us, sometimes, and many of us, perhaps most of the time, have illusions about the the power of our will. We often overestimate how free we are to choose, or what factors even outside of our consciousness may be influencing our choices. Most of us frequently overestimate the power of our will. So many times we set an intention and then don’t carry it out. For me, this does not suggest that Willing is not an essential, necessary aspect of Human Existence and ought not to be included as primary in any psychology of Human Beings.

John Smith’s efforts to construct a conceptual framework for understanding how the mind and body might be interrelated is interesting and stimulating to me. I do think at times he is confusing three issues: 1. how can a mind-function, namely Will, influence a body-function, for example movement or picking up a hamburger; 2. what is the relationship between the “activities” of the brain (material and body—energy and motion) and the activities of the mind (psychological and non-material- including thinking and willing); 3. what is the relationship of the extancy of the mind and the body (does one cause or even give rise to the other). I am having my own troubles adequately and persuasively theorizing about this third relationship and am trying to complete another essay focusing on these issues.

I do use gerunds as in “minding” “willing” “thinking” to indicate I am proposing that the psychological world is not material, and can be thought of as a set of processes.

Thanks for the essay, John Smith. I may have more responses as time goes on and I spend more time receptively engaged with your proposals. I look forward to more conceptualizing from you. Harris Stern