[ExI] will as essence

[gts]

On Sat, 23 Jun 2007 14:41:48 -0400, Damien Broderick  
<thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:

> Especially since Benjamin Libet and others showed that the conscious
> experience of willing an act lags by some 200 to 500 millisecs the
> brain's activation of the relevant volitional processes or "readiness
> potential". Even granting that willing is a real experience, and
> sometimes very vivid, it can't be "your essence" unless your essence
> is to be a machine that only belatedly notices what it's up to.

Those volitional processes that come into being before the conscious  
experience are acts of the will.

For example, as an illustration of the experiment you cite, I might  
unconsciously pull my hand away from a fire before I notice consciously  
that I've done so. But this does not mean that I did not at some level  
will to pull my hand away from the fire!

As per Schopenhauer, the intellect serves the will, not the other way  
around.

Libet's experimental results do not falsify Schopenhauer's conjecture.  
They corroborate it.

-gts