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thanks for the clarifications.
so free will seems to function best in action theory/ethics--if you want to hold individuals accountable for their actions, you need a way of enframing actions as following from choices freely made by competent people.
so it is an assumption. you can decide to accept it because the consequences of its being in place are preferable to the contrary and so there we are. i dont think anything in action theory/ethics actually demonstrates that there is or is not "free will"--so i take it a structuring rule/assumption for that particular language game, if you like.
as for the filth's rephrase about consciousness being reactive---there are a lot of problems.
in old-school epistemology, consciousness experiences the world as given and so perception would be in a sense reactive. but that leaned on a pile of assumptions--the mind-body split, correlates of the soul that enable one to take consciousness as itself simply given and start from that. it'd probably take way too long to explain this, so i'll just say it---there is no reason to assume a mind-body split; the is no reason to accept any correlate of the christian doctrine of the soul as saying anything beyond what christians might believe to be the case, and even this would have to be limited to a particular type of statement (answers to a question like "how would your religious beliefs lead you to describe what it means to be human" or some such)--it seems more like we are processes, complicated networks of processes that link somehow across scales in ways that we do not yet understand---part of the reason for this is that it seems that the types of bio-system relations that we have to, say, language are not much at all like the relations that we have to the world as strucured through language (and almost everything about how we see the world is so structured)--so there is something other than a recursive problem involved with trying to loop around this kind of relation and see something else simply because we seem to have trouble breaking with our own logic--well not even logic--our own modes of staging the world, better. not exactly representing it--staging it. there is some interesting stuff out there about this--in linguistic-type work, based on complex dynamic systems assumptions, r. petitot (i forget his first name) has been developing topological models as a way of trying to show something of human relations to language at the biological level. they're interesting. they sure look cool. i dont know who one would evaluate them, really. i think about this perhaps too much.
anyway, we are active in the world, but that world is itself particular, social-historically particular--so we create the world as meaningful for ourselves but within particular limits. (one implication of this is that old-school epistemology gets dissolved into an aspect of social ontology, but that is another matter.)
so if we are embodied, and embodiment entails that we are processes, then we cannot be reactive. on the other hand, consciousness is embodied but in a way that is filtered--for example we are not plagued with the noise of our own physical processing somehow--not all physical co-ordination is conscious--so some subsystems would unfold in a manner that would be more or less reactive--reflexes, responses to physical pain, etc.
ugh.
i wanted this to be short and here we are, not short, but still with not even the barest outline. summary: we are both active and reactive. we are neither. the question is too simple. problems problems. sometimes i think it would have been better to become a mechanic or something--deal with closed relatively simple systems and just make em work----but my total incompetence would have surfaced sooner or later--but still, it is a nice fantasy, something other---this philo stuff makes my brain tired.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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