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Act I Close: Unnatural in Volition

Working notes, not prose. This page is a research packet for drafting the chapter: the brief, source material, questions, examples, reader perspectives, and the earlier draft.

Brief

Research

Note on inputs: the chapter file currently has only the brief (no Quote options, no Earlier draft), so nothing below repeats earlier quote picks. Facts drawn from memory rather than a fetched page are marked (check).

Core argument

  1. Recap Act I in one breath. Wanting makes a someone (Ch. 1). Wants collide (Ch. 2) and wants take others in (Ch. 3). Each of us sees all of this from inside a filtered view (Ch. 4). The question left open: is our wanting different in kind from a bacterium’s, a dog’s or a chimp’s, or only in degree?
  2. Grant the animals a lot. Volition is real across life: bacteria swim up sugar gradients, cuttlefish wait for better food, chimps plan tool use and stack boxes. Don’t build “unnatural” on a strawman of dumb beasts. The honest claim is comparative.
  3. Name what looks different: range, reach and recursion.
    • Range: how many alternatives we can represent.
    • Reach: how far ahead in time a want can extend. We plant trees for grandchildren and write constitutions for strangers.
    • Recursion: we want things about our wants. That is Frankfurt’s second-order desires: the smoker who wants not to want the cigarette. Together these make it look as if nothing fixes what we will do.
  4. Show the extreme cases. People act against the deepest biological wants: hunger strikers, celibate monks, soldiers who refuse orders, self-sacrifice for an idea. No other animal we know of starves itself for an abstraction. This is where “close to ultimate freedom” feels most real.
  5. Then turn the lens on the appearance. Schopenhauer’s line: we can do what we will, but not will what we will. Libet, and the work that followed, shows the brain getting ready before we report deciding. Sapolsky pushes the regress: every “I chose” has causes behind it, which have causes behind them. Brain tumours, hunger and broken promises (Kidd 2012) all shift “willpower”. The feeling of authorship is a report, and reports can be wrong. This ties back to Ch. 4.
  6. Separate three claims that usually get blurred:
    • (a) we have more options than other animals, which is clearly true;
    • (b) we can shape our future wants, which is true but slow, partial and social;
    • (c) our choices are uncaused, which is unsupported and probably incoherent. The unnaturalness lives in (a) and (b), not (c).
  7. Locate the real novelty in self-binding and self-shaping. Ulysses tying himself to the mast, alarm clocks, vows, laws and habits. Humans take their own future wanting as an object they can engineer. That is will acting on will through the world, a loop that sets up Act II’s representation (Ch. 6) and Act III’s loops.
  8. The honest verdict. Compared with the chimp we appear nearly free. Compared with the physics we are not free at all. Both are true at different scales. Call it unnatural in volition: not outside causation, but with an unusually long, many-layered, self-referring causal chain that includes our own models of ourselves.
  9. Consequence for the reader. The appearance is useful and dangerous. It grounds responsibility and hope. It also feeds blame, pride and the belief that others “just chose” their circumstances. Hold it the way Einstein did: as a source of tolerance, not of license.

Key questions

  1. If a chimp can plan to get a banana, what exactly can I do that it can’t: choose more, or choose about my choosing?
  2. Can you want to want something? Can a dog?
  3. When I “decide”, is the deciding happening, or is it being reported to me after the fact?
  4. If my brain begins preparing a movement before I feel I’ve decided, whose decision was it?
  5. Does it matter that the Libet-style lag seems to vanish for deliberate, meaningful decisions (Maoz et al. 2019)?
  6. Is “free” the opposite of “caused”, or the opposite of “coerced”?
  7. Why does starving yourself for a cause feel like the freest act possible when it is also the most driven?
  8. A child asks: “If I didn’t choose what I like, how come it feels like I did?”
  9. A cynic asks: “Isn’t ‘free will’ just the story the winners tell so they can say the losers chose to lose?”
  10. If willpower in the marshmallow test depends partly on whether adults kept their promises, is self-control a trait or a verdict about the environment?
  11. What do we lose, practically, if we stop believing in free will? And what do we gain?
  12. Is binding yourself (a vow, a lock, a law) a use of freedom or a surrender of it?
  13. How far into the future can an animal’s want reach? How far can ours? Does reach count as freedom?
  14. If a tumour can change what someone wants (the 2003 Burns and Swerdlow case), where is the “real” person in a case like that?
  15. Are groups (juries, nations, companies) more or less free than individuals?
  16. Is our freedom mostly a matter of imagination, being able to represent options that aren’t in front of us?
  17. What does it mean to be unnatural if we are also completely made of nature?
  18. Could the feeling of free will itself be an adaptation, useful because it drives effort, planning and accountability?
  19. If you could see all the causes of your next choice, would you still experience it as a choice?
  20. Which of your wants would you keep if you could edit them, and who is doing the editing?

Examples

  1. Bacterial chemotaxis (cells). E. coli alternates “runs” and “tumbles” and biases them toward food. This is the minimal case of an organism acting for its own sake, which Kevin Mitchell uses as the root of agency in Free Agents (2023). The point: volition has a long natural history, so ours has to be measured against it.
  2. Cuttlefish and the marshmallow test (invertebrates). Schnell et al. (2021, Proc. R. Soc. B) found cuttlefish would wait for a preferred prey rather than take a less preferred one at once. Some waited a minute or more (check exact delays: reported roughly 50 to 130 s), and better waiters learned faster. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2020.3161 (paywalled, not fetched). The point: self-control is not uniquely human.
  3. Köhler’s chimpanzees on Tenerife (animals, 1914 to 1917). Chimps stacked crates and joined sticks to reach bananas. Köhler read this as insight rather than trial and error. The Mentality of Apes (1917). The best-known chimp is Sultan (check name). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_K%C3%B6hler. Use it for the “very intelligent animal” baseline: real planning, bounded by the present scene.
  4. Boysen’s reverse-contingency task (animals, 1990s). A chimp had to point to the smaller pile of candy to receive the larger. Chimps kept pointing at the bigger pile, but succeeded when numerals replaced the candy (check details: Boysen & Berntson 1995/1996, chimp Sheba). This is a clean picture of a symbol loosening the grip of an immediate want, and a bridge to Ch. 6.
  5. The marshmallow test and its revisions (children). Mischel and Ebbesen (1970) ran 32 preschoolers aged about 3.5 to 5.7. Watts, Duncan and Quan (2018) found much smaller effects once background was controlled. Kidd et al. at Rochester (2012 to 2013) found children who had just experienced a broken promise waited about a quarter as long. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment. The point: “willpower” is partly a rational read of whether the world keeps its word.
  6. Libet (1983/1985) (people, the lab). The readiness potential began about 550 ms before movement, and reported awareness of intending came at about 200 ms. Libet himself kept a “veto” role for conscious will. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/unconscious-cerebral-initiative-and-the-role-of-conscious-will-in-voluntary-action/D215D2A77F1140CD0D8DA6AB93DA5499
  7. After Libet.
    • Soon et al. (2008) predicted left versus right button choices up to about 10 s before awareness, but only with about 60% accuracy.
    • Schurger et al. (2012) argued the readiness potential may be accumulated background noise, not a hidden decision.
    • Maoz et al. (2019) found no readiness potential for deliberate, meaningful choices.
    • Schultze-Kraft et al. (2016) found people could veto until about 200 ms before movement. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will. The honest lesson: the lab shows the feeling of deciding is not a reliable timestamp. It does not show deliberation is fake.
  8. The tumour cases (people). Charles Whitman (Austin, 1966) had a brain tumour found at autopsy (check). Burns and Swerdlow (2003, Archives of Neurology) described a man whose new paedophilic urges disappeared when an orbitofrontal tumour was removed and returned when it regrew (check). Sapolsky leans on cases like these. The point: what we want can be changed from below.
  9. Hunger strikes (people against biology). Bobby Sands died in 1981 after 66 days on hunger strike (check). Gandhi’s fasts are another example. So is Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation in Saigon in 1963 (check). These are the strongest appearance of will overriding every drive. They are also examples of a want (for a cause, an identity or a people) winning over another want, not of wanting nothing.
  10. Ulysses and the Sirens, and modern Ulysses pacts (people and institutions).
    • Psychiatric advance directives.
    • Antabuse.
    • Apple designing iPhone encryption it cannot itself break, called a “digital Ulysses pact”. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_pact. Self-binding is the distinctly human move: acting on your future will through the world.
  11. The Future Library (civilization-scale reach). Katie Paterson’s project in Oslo (2014 to 2114): a forest planted to print books written now and read in a century (check). Wants that extend beyond the lifetime of anyone who wants them.
  12. Constitutions as precommitment (groups). Entrenched clauses, supermajority amendment rules, and California initiatives that restrict their own amendment (see the Ulysses pact page). A whole society binds its future self.
  13. Toxoplasma and the fearless rat (a parasite hijacking will). Infected rodents lose their aversion to cat odour (check: Berdoy et al. 2000). It is a vivid, creepy reminder that “wanting” can be installed from outside, and a good fit for the cynical reader.
  14. William James’s crisis (1870). Depressed and paralysed by determinism, James resolved in his diary that his first act of free will would be to believe in it. The belief itself was used as a tool. That makes it a case of second-order will in a real life.
  15. A thought experiment: the perfect predictor. Someone hands you a sealed envelope saying what you’ll order for lunch. Does knowing it exists change what you order? If you deliberately order otherwise, was that freedom, or just another predictable cause (contrariness)?

Source material

  1. Frankfurt: second-order desires as the human mark.

    “It seems to be peculiarly characteristic of humans, however, that they are able to form what I shall call ‘second-order desires.’”

    Harry G. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” Journal of Philosophy 68(1), 1971, pp. 5–20, at p. 6; reprinted in The Importance of What We Care About (1988). [verified: https://tonylau1013.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/frankfurt-freedom-of-the-will-and-the-concept-of-a-person/ (a secondary site quoting the text; check against the book before print)]. Use: the philosophical hinge for “recursion”. What sets us apart from the chimp is wanting about wanting, not wanting itself.

  2. Frankfurt: animals share first-order will.

    “Human beings are not alone in having desires and motives, or in making choices. They share these things with the members of certain other species, some of which even appear to engage in deliberation and to make decisions based upon prior thought.”

    Same essay, 1971, p. 6. [UNVERIFIED: recalled wording, no accessible full text was fetched]. Use: it grants the animals their due before claiming a difference, which fits step 2.

  3. Schopenhauer, via Einstein.

    “I do not at all believe in human freedom in the philosophical sense. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer’s saying, ‘A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants,’ has been a very real inspiration to me since my youth”

    Albert Einstein, “The World As I See It” (1931; in Mein Weltbild, 1934). [verified: https://fs.blog/einstein-the-world-as-i-see-it/]. Use: the cleanest statement of the “appearance” problem, plus Einstein’s point that seeing it breeds tolerance rather than despair.

  4. Libet on the role left for conscious will.

    “The role of conscious will would be not to initiate a specific voluntary act but rather to select and control volitional outcome.”

    Benjamin Libet, “Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8(4), 1985, pp. 529–566, abstract. [verified: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/unconscious-cerebral-initiative-and-the-role-of-conscious-will-in-voluntary-action/D215D2A77F1140CD0D8DA6AB93DA5499]. Use: it shows that even the experiment famous for “disproving” free will ended on a modest, veto-like role, which is a good model of honesty.

  5. Sapolsky on luck.

    “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.”

    Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (Penguin Press, 2023), excerpted in the Harvard Gazette, January 2024. [verified: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/01/you-did-it-of-your-own-free-will-no-such-thing/]. Use: the strongest counterweight. It also continues Ch. 2’s Sapolsky-style layered explanation straight into the will itself.

  6. Sapolsky on the regress.

    “It’s antecedent causes all the way down, not a floating turtle or causeless cause to be found.”

    Same book, 2023, same excerpt. [verified: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/01/you-did-it-of-your-own-free-will-no-such-thing/]. Use: a line the reader will remember for claim (c), that choices are uncaused, and why the chapter drops it.

  7. Mitchell on agency as an evolved capacity.

    “If free will is the capacity for conscious, rational control of our actions, then I am happy in saying we have it”

    Kevin J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Princeton UP, 2023), p. 282. [verified: https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2024/01/23/book-review-free-agents-how-evolution-gave-us-free-will/ (quoted in a review)]. Use: the compatibilist-biologist reply to Sapolsky. Freedom comes in degrees, and it evolved. That fits “unnatural” as a matter of degree, not magic.

    Also from Mitchell, p. 281, verified at the same URL: “meaning drives the mechanisms. Acting for a reason is what living systems are physically set up to do”. This bridges back to Ch. 1’s volo ergo sum.

  8. Epictetus on what is up to us.

    “Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions.”

    Epictetus, Enchiridion §1 (c. 125 CE), trans. Elizabeth Carter. [verified: http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html]. Use: an ancient version of the chapter’s claim. It notably puts desire on the “in our control” side, which the chapter can test against Schopenhauer.

  9. Sartre on being condemned to be free.

    “We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free.”

    Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (lecture 1945; publ. 1946), trans. Philip Mairet. [verified: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm]. Use: the maximal “ultimate freedom” pole. Put it opposite Sapolsky, and let the chapter stand between them.

  10. William James on believing as an act.

    “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

    William James, diary entry, 30 April 1870, in R. B. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (1935), vol. 1, p. 323. [verified: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_James (secondary; check against Perry)]. Use: a human case of will acting on belief about will. It also fits: “Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent.” (Principles of Psychology, 1890, ch. 4; same URL.) That line shows how we bind our own futures.

Counterarguments and limits

Connections

Exercise ideas

  1. The second-order audit (10 minutes).

    • Do: Write down three things you wanted today, such as a snack, checking your phone or snapping at someone. Next to each, write whether you want to want it: yes, no, or not sure. For each “no”, write one thing you could change in your surroundings, not in your willpower, that would make that want less likely tomorrow.
    • Notice: first-order wants arrive on their own; you didn’t choose them. The second column is where you seem freest. The third column shows that your freedom works mainly by rearranging the world.
    • Why it serves the chapter: it lets the reader feel Frankfurt’s recursion and Schopenhauer’s limit at the same moment. The lever is real, but indirect.

  2. Catch the decision (a 2-minute home Libet).

    • Do: Sit with a clock that shows seconds. Several times, lift a finger “whenever you feel like it”. Try to note the exact second you decided. Then do it for a choice that matters, such as which of two tasks to do first.
    • Notice: how hard it is to find the moment of decision in the trivial case, and whether it feels different when reasons are involved.
    • Why it serves the chapter: it lets the reader test the appearance of free will at first hand. It also mirrors the actual science (arbitrary versus deliberate choices, Maoz 2019) rather than taking a headline on trust.

  3. Tie yourself to the mast (one week).

    • Do: Pick one small want you don’t endorse. Set up a single Ulysses pact against it, such as the phone in another room at night, a public promise to a friend, or no snacks bought. Keep a one-line daily log: did the pact hold, and how did it feel when the want arrived?
    • Notice: the want still shows up, but the action changes. Also notice whether binding yourself felt like losing freedom or using it.
    • Why it serves the chapter: self-binding is the chapter’s candidate for what is genuinely unnatural about human will. The reader does it rather than just reading about it.

Open questions for the author

Reader perspectives

Curious young child

First reactions:

Questions they’d ask:

  1. “Can my dog decide to be a cat?”
  2. “Can a crow decide to go on a diet?”
  3. “Why can I decide to not eat the cookie but my dog can’t?”
  4. “Can I decide to be a firefighter AND an astronaut? My hamster can’t decide to be anything.”
  5. “If I decide to want something I don’t want, like broccoli, does it work?”
  6. “Did I choose to like dinosaurs, or did it just happen?”
  7. “If my brain decides before I do, who’s the boss?”
  8. “Can animals make promises?”
  9. “Are there things I can’t want even if I try?”
  10. “Is being grounded the opposite of free will?”
  11. “Why does the book say we’re unnatural if we’re just really good at wanting?”

Where they’d get lost, bored, offended or unconvinced:

Examples they’d bring:

What would win them over:

Cynical adult

First reactions:

Questions they’d ask:

  1. Free compared with what? A chimp? A crow? A toddler? Pick the comparison and state what the difference actually is.
  2. Is this libertarian free will, compatibilism, or “it feels free and that’s enough”? Say which.
  3. Sapolsky’s Determined (2023) says there’s no free will at all, using the layered model chapter 2 borrowed. Why doesn’t that settle it?
  4. If the freedom is “appearance,” why build the book’s first “unnatural” on it?
  5. What’s the actual mechanism of the extra freedom: language, planning, wanting to want, culture?
  6. Can I use this freedom to stop checking my phone? If not, what’s it for?
  7. Does “near-ultimate freedom” apply to someone in poverty, in prison or with an addiction? Or is it a luxury claim?
  8. Isn’t claiming humans are uniquely free exactly the story every religion told to put us above animals, which this book says it won’t do?
  9. What would count as evidence that an animal has comparable volition? Would you change the chapter if it turned up?

Where they’d get lost, bored, offended or unconvinced:

Examples they’d bring:

What would win them over:

Believer / spiritual reader

First reactions:

Questions they’d ask:

  1. Is our freedom given (by God, by nature, by evolution), or is it an achievement? The word “unnatural” suggests it was taken, or broke away.
  2. If much of it is appearance, what remains? Enough for praise and blame, confession and forgiveness?
  3. Does a Calvinist (Luther’s The Bondage of the Will, 1525) or an Ash’arite occasionalist have a better account of the “appearance” part than a neuroscientist?
  4. What is freedom for? Traditions say freedom is fulfilled in choosing the good (Deut 30:19, “choose life”) and not in choosing endlessly. Does the book agree?
  5. Animals don’t sin. Is the capacity to do evil the real mark of our unnatural volition?
  6. Can we freely will our wants, or only act on them? (Schopenhauer: one can do what one wills but not will what one wills.)
  7. Is surrender (islām, “Thy will be done”, Gita 18.66) a loss of freedom or its highest use?
  8. Where do spiritual disciplines, like fasting, vigils and vows, fit? They look like humans deliberately practicing the freedom that animals lack.
  9. If our volition is “unnatural”, are we responsible for the rest of nature in a way animals aren’t? (Gen 2:15, “to dress it and to keep it”.)
  10. Would a Buddhist say the freest being is the one who wants least, which is the opposite of your measure?

Where they’d get lost, bored, offended or unconvinced:

Examples they’d bring:

What would win them over:

Skeptical scientist

First reactions:

Questions they’d ask:

  1. Freedom from what: external constraint, immediate impulse, genetic program, physical causation? Only the first two are empirically testable.
  2. Which “very intelligent animal” is the comparison: chimps, corvids, cephalopods? Each beats naive expectations somewhere.
  3. What behaviors would count as evidence of more freedom? Longer delays of gratification? Acting against biological drives (hunger strikes, celibacy)? Choosing one’s own desires?
  4. Is the human difference in capacities or in scaffolding (language, institutions, calendars)? If it is scaffolding, is it still our volition?
  5. What does the readiness-potential literature actually show today?
  6. How much of human self-control research survived replication? Ego depletion? The marshmallow test’s predictive power?
  7. Is “appearance” a claim about the metaphysics (determinism) or the psychology (we overestimate our control)? These need different evidence.
  8. Could an animal show second-order desires, wanting to not want something? What would that look like?
  9. If freedom is mostly appearance, why does believing in it matter behaviorally? And is the evidence for that (Vohs & Schooler 2008) itself robust?
  10. Is “unnatural” earned if the difference is a matter of degree? At what threshold does degree become kind?

Where they’d get lost, bored, offended or unconvinced:

Examples they’d bring:

What would win them over: