[ExI] Next moment, everything around you will probably change

[gts]

On Sat, 23 Jun 2007 12:50:56 -0400, Jef Allbright <jef at jefallbright.net>  
wrote:

> Gordon, in your statement above, your concept of "will" does appear to
> perform exactly the same as my concept of agency.  So please consider
> that to be agreement between us! :-)

Okay.

But I make a distinction between will and agency. As I mentioned to you in  
my last, I see agency as the faculty through which a person executes his  
will.

Your will is your essence at any given moment. It is not a "model", nor is  
it an "abstract entity". Your will is perhaps the only concrete,  
non-abstract thing in all the world. You know nothing more intimately than  
you know your own will. When you want to eat, you want to eat; when you  
want to sleep, you want to sleep! Nothing abstract about it! This is what  
I meant when I wrote that the will is primitive in the sense meant by  
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

> Consider these spoken by the same agent interleaved throughout the same  
> day.  Clearly it's the same agent throughout the day, but to the extent  
> the agent is is
> acting/exercising/implementing the will of another entity, who is the
> entity behind the action?

I'd say it's always the actor. Your example of "I am doing God's will"  
parses out to be "I am doing my own will, which is to do what I think is  
God's will". Nobody does what they don't want to do.

> What if the agent is not a biological human, but a robotic machine?

I'm not sure there is a difference between them.

-gts