a quiet place of my own

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of years after I dropped out of academic philosophy, I began to reflect on a suite of philosophical problems that have several features in common:

their apparent importance, even cruciality,
controversy surrounding them based on differing philosophical commitments, intuitions, or assumptions, and, nonetheless,
persistent, empirical judgments regarding them, by most people, that don't go away, even when a skeptical philosophical argument against the intuitive position is accepted by a given person.

A central example would be the question of free will. It seems as though a lot would be riding on the answer, but I assert, in rather Moorean fashion, that ordinarily all humans feel and act as though they are in control of their own actions, no matter what theories they may espouse. Personally, I find epiphenomenalism somewhat compelling, the idea that our conscious minds may be "just along for the ride," but that can't change the factoid that we're in the driver's seat, and that sense is not going to go away even if I (for instance) become convinced that we don't "actually" have free will.

The epiphenomenalist view is interesting, because it helps to demonstrate in the sharpest way that the correctness of a theory of consciousness (and consequently of agency) doesn't change how things seem to go for us. Imagine that epiphenomenalism is correct, and my conscious experience and sense of deciding on my own actions is just an illusion. Because, however, I still have feelings of making decisions and acting on them in a way that is seamlessly coordinated with my brain states and my body's behavior, I will never have a confounding experience to refute this sense. For whatever whacky reason, my conscious awareness is along for the ride in just such a way that, like George W. Bush, I'm the decider.

Dennett argues against homonculus theories of consciousness and self. I'll need to review his position, but I suspect it doesn't have much to do with the condition I'm talking about, the inescapability of the homunculus pose within our own experience.

It will be important to point out that I'm not talking about the psychological deformations that can take place in an individual when they become convinced there is no free will. We can imagine one person trying real hard to do the right thing, in case the theory is incorrect, but another person might throw caution to the wind and commit atrocities, supposing that no compunctions they may feel have any real, ethical force.

The further objection that the latter rather proves, doesn't it, that our consciousness does have some effect on changing our actions, can be addressed simply: just because we're aware of our change in theoretical posture and we consciously support our having embarked on a life of crime doesn't refute epiphenomenalism or any other anti-free will theory. If epiphenomenalism were correct, everything would continue to be synchronized just so that we felt we were making efficacious decisions.

My preferred reaction to what I would call the Inescapability Principle is a peculiar form of philosophical quietism. The quietism I've been exposed to the most is Rorty's, in which he extends Wittgenstein's "whereof we cannot speak…" to include most of what is practiced in anglophone, analytic philosophy departments. He advocates a quietism that puts to rest theories about right and wrong, free will, and, indeed, anything about which we feel tempted to say, "This is the [right|correct|true] view," the reason being largely that arguing over truth is the source of strife, invective, and damage to others, and is an obstacle to collegiality and solidarity which are obvious desiderata.

I may talk about Rorty's quietism another time, but I think it differs from mine. He is saying that philosophical theory-making is a bane pragmatically and should be avoided, while I'm saying there's no getting away from certain fundamental impressions we tend to have in human experience and out of respect for which we act, or seem to, in certain ways. My quietism, on its own, doesn't lead to any prescriptions for how it would be better to think; it merely acknowledges that we do seem to think and sense in certain ways, and that this seeming, contra Hamlet, is enough.

The eventual essay would deal with other examples of the Inescapability Principle besides free will.

long and short

a quiet place of my own