“Defending Free Will & The Self”
Frank S. Robinson in Philosophy Now magazine
This just takes us to the part where we try to explain where the rider ends and the elephant begins…given our current understanding of how the brain itself functions as a wholly integrated component of nature. Just one more natural manifestation of existence no less compelled to be in sync with the laws of nature than any other matter.
It’s always back to human minds attempting to explain human minds…minds that in some profoundly problematic way have somehow acquired the capacity to actually do this.
We are “inside” a “reality” that we would seem only able to encompass if we could get “outside” of it.
Instead, we become entangled in all the convoluted ways there are in which to think about it:
I still recall an experience I once had in which I was completely absorbed in thinking about a woman while driving nearly 10 miles on “autopilot”. Out of the blue I realized I had driven from Iona Terrace to Kenwood Avenue without [seemingly] doing so consciously. I simply didn’t remember accelerating of braking or turning the car in a new direction.
Or the times I would read the same book to my daughter over and over again and somehow my mind was able to go to other things while continuing to read the words as though in a trance.
And then those extraordinary dreams I have in which “I” am doing all manner of amazing things that I am not really doing at all.
The mind as matter is really something we are just scratching the surface in understanding.
So, anyone here able to fully explain why?