The Questions · the self · the two systems
Do you author your own reactions?
The conclusion arrives whole. You did not watch it assemble. So are you the one making it, or the one watching your own apparatus make it and signing the form afterwards?
Half of what you do arrives complete, before you had any say.
What this settles
Which concedes the uncomfortable half rather than arguing with it. The urges are not yours to author and pretending otherwise is where most accounts of self-command go wrong. The argument is about the other half — and it only becomes a real argument once this half has been given up.
Not this question
How we operate?
Also in this footing, and a different question. That one names the two systems. This one asks what is left of authorship once one of them is conceded.
Also asked as
- If the conclusion arrives whole — are you the one making it, or the one watching your own apparatus make it and signing the form after?
- Or was it running the whole time and the shock is when you finally noticed it running?
Where this is worked out
Do You Author Your Own Reactions?
Items without a link are sessions, shorts, strand reads or frameworks that live as video or audio rather than as pages. Everything Philosophy Zero puts out is listed on the Shelf.
Nothing on this page is composed. Every sentence in the answer is drawn from the pieces listed above. Where a claim is compressed, it is compressed from one of them and adds nothing they do not say.
The two systems
What arrives in you already moving and what you build by weighing — which half you govern, which half you only ever witness, and how the switch between them is thrown. 3 of the 4 here have been worked through; the rest are on the map and not yet walked.
- Do you control your own feelings?walked
- How we operate?walked
- How is the switch between systems actually thrown?not explored yet