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Free Will and the Choice to Focus

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The behavior of, say, salmon in swimming upstream back to their birth river to breed... that's learned?  Chosen?  An act of focus?

I'm glad you asked this, since it brings out some important points and distinctions. One important idea is considering innate capacities in contrast to learning. Both of these are distinct from behavior.

An innate capacity exists at birth, or develops on its own over time without any thought required. One doesn't learn how to employ these capacities: they require no experience to function, and are attuned to certain stimuli. Some people claim that this implies holding innate concepts, others might claim this implies innate knowledge. But these capacities allow representations to form, and produce something probably SIMILAR to a percept. I don't know if this part requires focus, but it is the basis of behavior, and humans have innate capacities. It allows geese to migrate, for example, or babies to start conceptualizing objects (before forming their first concept).

But is that enough for action? I'd say no. Forming any representation, or even holding a percept, doesn't guarantee action. Something needs to go on where the representation is acted upon. At a bare minimum, focus is required to act. At least for innate capacities, using them would take focus. Don't mix this with modern computers, which lack mental states, so focus isn't a possibility for them. Some form of volitional choice or willpower gets action going.

We also need to distinguish learning from the innate capacity. The representations may be formed without any real mental work or will (formed through instinct, if you will), but that doesn't mean any animal will employ those representations the same way every time. What to do with a representation is going to be learned. Perhaps it will be a simple selection in the end when a goose doesn't need to create elaborate maps by math as people do, although the selection itself takes some experience and focus. Still, that learning isn't going on isn't enough to say focus didn't happen.

I hope that makes things clearer. Instinct might not be a useful concept anymore from this analysis, as "unfocused" doesn't work so well as a distinction anymore.

About evasion, I think that's a uniquely human ability made possible by conceptual awareness.

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...

An innate capacity exists at birth, or develops on its own over time without any thought required. One doesn't learn how to employ these capacities: they require no experience to function, and are attuned to certain stimuli. Some people claim that this implies holding innate concepts, others might claim this implies innate knowledge. But these capacities allow representations to form, and produce something probably SIMILAR to a percept. I don't know if this part requires focus, but it is the basis of behavior, and humans have innate capacities. It allows geese to migrate, for example, or babies to start conceptualizing objects (before forming their first concept).

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This innate capacity sounds like instinct to me.

 

 

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But is that enough for action? I'd say no. Forming any representation, or even holding a percept, doesn't guarantee action. Something needs to go on where the representation is acted upon. At a bare minimum, focus is required to act. At least for innate capacities, using them would take focus. Don't mix this with modern computers, which lack mental states, so focus isn't a possibility for them. Some form of volitional choice or willpower gets action going.

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Computers are designed to simplify mental calculations for users.  I won't press the computer analogy since you're dead set against it, but I will point out a similarity to instinct behaving like a program running in the background that one is aware of and can override.

 

 

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We also need to distinguish learning from the innate capacity. The representations may be formed without any real mental work or will (formed through instinct, if you will), but that doesn't mean any animal will employ those representations the same way every time. What to do with a representation is going to be learned. Perhaps it will be a simple selection in the end when a goose doesn't need to create elaborate maps by math as people do, although the selection itself takes some experience and focus. Still, that learning isn't going on isn't enough to say focus didn't happen.

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Focus only happens as an exercise of willpower, but one can form memories while going through the motions of routine behavior.  I'm not focused on the mechanics of walking on my way to work (which sometimes leads to tripping), but I am aware of the passing scenery even though I'm focused on what I need to do when I arrive at work.  If I pass through a dangerous neighborhood, I will remember it and probably alter my route in the future.  Migratory geese may be similarily aware of things they encounter along the way, like hunters shooting at them, yet are unable (or unwilling) to alter their instinctive course to a safer route.  Are there any examples of an otherwise healthy goose intentionally avoiding a migratory pattern?

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And I take the position that there is sufficient behavioral evidence to differentiate between instinctive behavior and nurtured/learned behavior.  Having two concepts is justifiable.

 

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So do I; it's not a case of either or, i.e., flipping from one state to another.  Two concepts are useful to determine the degree of influence instinct has on behavior, and whether positing volitionally willfull behavior is justifiable by observation.

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So do I; it's not a case of either or, i.e., flipping from one state to another.  Two concepts are useful to determine the degree of influence instinct has on behavior, and whether positing volitionally willfull behavior is justifiable by observation.

Instinct and/or fixed action patterns (which animals including humans are born with) are fundamentally different from learned, complex behavior - and each are governed by different areas of the brain.  Damage to the basal ganglia, which is the seat of fixed action patterns, is implicated in such diseases as Tourretes and Parkinsons which are characterized by the release/inhibition of movements in response to stimuli.  This fixed action pattern behavior is something entirely different than a wolf learning to hunt and bring down prey as a member of a pack.

 

I've read dozens of books on cognition over the last 25/30 years, and almost to a one, the word "instinct" is hardely if ever used.  The word instinct has to much "God of the Gaps" type baggage to be of much use in science.  It has to be used very specifically and very carefully.  

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Migratory geese may be similarily aware of things they encounter along the way, like hunters shooting at them, yet are unable (or unwilling) to alter their instinctive course to a safer route.  Are there any examples of an otherwise healthy goose intentionally avoiding a migratory pattern?

You're talking about a conceptual ability to identify a greater number of alternatives, not an ability to choose at all. I think you missed my distinction between behavior, and innate capacities. Migratory patterns are quite complex and birds need to be able to form the right representations first. I imagine if you changed stimuli a certain way, healthy geese would avoid the migratory pattern. Of course it will be nothing like a human going his own way because he wants to make it big in Hollywood, but you can alter things so a goose will start acting strangely or in surprising ways (if you're still curious about an example, I'll find some specific studies). I'm okay if you consider innate capacities to be instincts, but it's not fair to distinguish behavior as instinctual OR volitional. It's better to think about behavior as conceptual or non-conceptual.

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 Are there any examples of an otherwise healthy goose intentionally avoiding a migratory pattern?

I grew up on a lake with a bunch of fat geese and ducks who did not migrate because they knew that the people living around the lake would feed them.  I googled "Is migration an instinct?" and came up with this story.  People use a radio controlled airplane to guide hand-raised chicks onto a migratory route.

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The biggest obstacle to a good and thorough grasp of volition, by far, is that we don't have the conceptual framework to think about it precisely. We don't have a scientific terminology; we have this implicit, "I'll-know-it-when-I-see-it" grab-bag of meanings (some of which are sound and some of which are cognitively worthless). Look at the last three pages, which were spent arguing about nothing whatsoever, for want of a better definition.

This ultimately boils down to the insufficiency of our concepts for entity-based causality. Causality, and particularly the O'ist idea of it, is implicit throughout the English language. However, like most things implicit, it's also full of warps and holes and all sorts of nonsense.

Until we can discuss causality itself with the same precision we use for astrophysics or geometry, we might as well be discussing the number of angels-per-pinhead.

We have a lot more work to do before we can even frame these questions properly.

Edited by Harrison Danneskjold
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The biggest obstacle to a good and thorough grasp of volition, by far, is that we don't have the conceptual framework to think about it precisely. We don't have a scientific terminology; [...] Look at the last three pages, which were spent arguing about nothing whatsoever, for want of a better definition.

The first 3 pages were exactly about precision and effective terminology. It is possible to speak of these things pretty well. What isn't known is how volition works on a neuroscience level, but on a cognitive science level, there's a lot to say about how the mind works. There are still questions, but I see the OP's question as a matter of using philosophy to determine what sort of answers we would find to the question. At the same time, the question takes a lot of science to answer.

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It is possible to speak of these things pretty well.

In your reply to Don Athos, where you said that modern computers don't have mental states - what did you mean by "mental state"?

It isn't sophistry. Programs can store, retrieve and manipulate data, even inbetween different executions at different times. A program that could 'sense' something through an I/O stream could be made to 'perceive' something with the data from multiple, simultaneous I/O streams; it'd be tricky but not impossible (just look up "machine vision"). Google has a neural network now, which had originally been trained to identify images but has been best-publicized for the fact that, when you basically run it backwards, it starts producing the crazy sort of visions that we only see in our sleep (it's called "deep dream"). I'd even go so far as to assert that, for any concrete action a person can perform, I can turn it into an algorithm that any virtual person could perform.

So whether computers have "mental state" or not really depends on what you mean by "mental" and to define that you have to ground it in our first-person qualia (on pain of Behaviorism) without implying any baseless assumptions about what they are or how they work (on pain of Rationalism).

And that's just to show that computers can't think yet (which truly is painfully obvious in that fuzzy, I'll-know-it-when-I-see-it way).

This doesn't mean we can't say anything about volition or that the fuzzy grasp we have isn't valid; it only means that we should strive to be a thousand times clearer and more specific in this than we are about anything else.

This is the frontier which hasn't been charted yet.

What isn't known is how volition works on a neuroscience level, but on a cognitive science level, there's a lot to say about how the mind works.

I think we understand the scientific side of it more clearly and the philosophical side less clearly than you think.

The first 3 pages were exactly about precision and effective terminology.

The first three pages were about DA's use of the word "instinct" with regard to percepts and your questioning whether it made sense with regard to sensations. If either of you had thought to specify what you meant, concretely, by X or Y in "if X do Y" it would've been immediately apparent that there was no disagreement at all.

There is a reason why volition is such a slippery issue; why any discussion of it turns so quickly and easily into "nuh-uh/yuh-huh" (even among thinking people); it's because our common vocabulary for it has not really been updated since the dark ages.

We should use it with caution.

*edited a few places for syntax' sake*

Edited by Harrison Danneskjold
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There is a reason why volition is such a slippery issue; why any discussion of it turns so quickly and easily into "nuh-uh/yuh-huh" (even among thinking people); it's because our common vocabulary for it has not really been updated since the dark ages.

It has been. As NewBuddha said, no one talks about instincts except in very narrow and specific contexts, far more narrowly than DA. I don't think DA disagrees all-out, so my posts so far have been to bring out important distinctions and terminology in a field I'm very familiar with and involved in. NewBuddha's posts are similarly informed and clarifying.

 

My bit about mental states, it was not a good place to get into it. I'd talk about it in another thread if you want.

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It has been.
A few results from a very brief search:

Choice: Replaced Old English cyre "choice, free will," from the same base.

Volition: From Medieval Latin volitionem "will, volition," noun of action from Latin stem (as in volo "I wish") of velle "to wish".

Mind: Late 12c, from Old English gemynd "memory, remembrance, state of being remembered; thought, purpose; conscious mind, intellect, intention".

I could go on. Some of the senses have shifted slightly since medieval Rome or Saxony, but the gist remains intact.

That makes sense, too. Since "consciousness" is axiomatic, how inventive could you really get with it (at least without making gibberish noise and probably being burned at the stake)?

In Merriam-Webster we find...

Believe

1a :to have a firm religious faith

1b :to accept something as true, genuine, or real

Old English belyfan "to believe," earlier geleafa (Mercian), gelefa (Northumbrian), gelyfan (West Saxon) "believe," from Proto-Germanic *ga-laubjan "to believe," perhaps literally "hold dear, love".

... a package-deal that's unbelievably common in modern America, could very easily screw up the very best of attempts to understand volition and which can be traced back to the Proto-Germans (or whoever), who thought to themselves one fine day that the idea for "knowledge" really means the same thing as the idea of "love".

The error that whoever made, however many centuries ago, is still being used in almost the same way through telephone wires and satellite signals.

*edited for clarity during someone's reply*

Edited by Harrison Danneskjold
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A few results from a very brief search:

Choice: Replaced Old English cyre "choice, free will," from the same base.

Volition: From Medieval Latin volitionem "will, volition," noun of action from Latin stem (as in volo "I wish") of velle "to wish".

Mind: Late 12c, from Old English gemynd "memory, remembrance, state of being remembered; thought, purpose; conscious mind, intellect, intention".

I could go on. Some of the senses have shifted slightly since medieval Rome or Saxony, but the gist remains intact.

That makes sense, too. Since "consciousness" is axiomatic, how inventive could you really get with it (at least without making gibberish noise and probably being burned at the stake)?

In Merriam-Webster (or at least what claims to be) we find...

Believe

1a :to have a firm religious faith

1b :to accept something as true, genuine, or real.

Old English belyfan "to believe," earlier geleafa (Mercian), gelefa (Northumbrian), gelyfan (West Saxon) "believe," from Proto-Germanic *ga-laubjan "to believe," perhaps literally "hold dear, love".

... a package-deal that's unbelievably common in modern America, could very easily screw up the very best of attempts to understand volition and which can be traced back to the Proto-Germans (or whoever).

How would you say your position relates to eliminativism and the eliminativist concept of folk psychology?

 

(I should explain what I mean by those terms, because my understanding may be incomplete, flawed, or different from yours. I take eliminativism about a mental concept to be the view that the concept does not refer to a well defined category in reality. For example, Daniel Dennett is an eliminativist of sorts about qualia, and the Churchlands are allegedly eliminativists about beliefs. Eliminativists usually say that concepts like these are part of a "folk psychology" that people develop as a useful way of dealing with the world prior to acquiring scientific knowledge.)

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I use Merriam-Webster as my goto for definitions and have been arguing for positing observable volitional, willful actions according to the following terms:

 
instinct as a natural desire or tendency that makes you want to act in a particular way,
-and-
free will as the ability to choose how to act; specifically, the ability to make choices that are not controlled by fate or God,
-and-
volition as the power to make your own choices or decisions.

 
My premise has been that all animals act instinctively by default, meaning action that is not marked by a determined will to act otherwise.  I'm not opposed to substituting the term unfocused for instinctive as I believe that conveys the same meaning.

 
My position is that infants are active from birth and one can hardly argue that knowledgable behavior (in any form) is either carried from the womb or acquired at birth.  There appears (to me) to be a necessary period of active transition from suckling, pooping and flailing arms to choosing when to eat, poop and move.  Responding properly to the OP is difficult when all behavior is presumed to reflect an attentive will and dismisses instinct out of hand.

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How would you say your position relates to eliminativism and the eliminativist concept of folk psychology?

"Eliminativism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. Its primary claim is that people's common-sense understanding of the mind (or folk psychology) is false and that certain classes of mental states [such as belief or desire] that most people believe in do not exist."

-Wikipedia

Initially, if "belief" (mentioned further into the article) doesn't exist then what is it people do with "folk psychology"?

More fundamentally, I'd say it depends on the state in question.

Obviously we must have beliefs and desires; if we couldn't actually do the stuff those ideas point to then we certainly couldn't build logical arguments (let alone rockets). Other alleged mental states, though (such as "the Holy Spirit" or "a dark presence" or "telepathy"), really are folk psychology which have already been scientifically disproven.

---

When I asked Eiuol what he meant by "mental state" I did not mean to prove the consciousness of computers or to disprove that of people (actually, I left it hanging in epistemic limbo); I used it only to illustrate how easy it is to accidentally assert any number of absurdities, when discussing volition.

When I pointed out the etymological roots of the package-deal many people refer to as "belief" I was not saying that there's no such thing as a belief, nor even that anybody here has made that error (they haven't); I used it only to illustrate the state of our concepts of consciousness, in comparison to any other science.

Although in that sense, yes, I am calling it "folk psychology"; not that there is no truth to such medieval concepts but that they need some serious renovation.

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I agree that Objectivist need to re-frame the Free Will vs. Determinism debate - and this can best be done by refusing to accept the "Free Will = Choice" argument in the first place.  By accepting that the answer to the question of Choice" somehow settles the question of Free Will, the Objectivist will lose every time.  Trying to disprove Determinism is like trying to prove that God doesn't exist.  The most we can ever hope to do is to point out the logical contradictions behind Determinism.  Determinism is not the loyal opposition - it is a contradiction.

 

The (modern) variant of Determinism stems, historically, from the Scholastic's, who hinged Man's ability to make free choices on man's relationship to an all-knowing,all-powerful God, and then from the Materialist who believe that Free Will and Choice somehow contradicts either causality and/or the conservation of energy.  Modern Materialism arose in conjunction with discoveries in science in the 1850's (evolution and thermodynamics, for example).  To the Materialist, the Universe was no longer "reversible", Laplace's Demon was dead, but they could not accept that it was in-determinate or exempt from causality (which it's not).

 

I believe this is what Harrison means when he says we have to re-define causality.  If so, I agree.

 

I also think that Louie is saying that we need to re-define choice.  If so, I agree.

 

I don't know what's wrong with defining choice as, "Suppose a deer hears a sound to it's left, glances to it's right and sees an uncrossable stream, hesitates, takes a step forward, then reverses course and heads back to the herd behind him."  Do we need to "deify" choice as both the Scholastic's and Materialist do?  Remember, Marxism has all the hallmarks of a religion, they just substituted Nature for God.

Edited by New Buddha
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In your reply to Don Athos, where you said that modern computers don't have mental states - what did you mean by "mental state"?

It isn't sophistry. Programs can store, retrieve and manipulate data, even inbetween different executions at different times. A program that could 'sense' something through an I/O stream could be made to 'perceive' something with the data from multiple, simultaneous I/O streams; it'd be tricky but not impossible (just look up "machine vision"). Google has a neural network now, which had originally been trained to identify images but has been best-publicized for the fact that, when you basically run it backwards, it starts producing the crazy sort of visions that we only see in our sleep (it's called "deep dream"). I'd even go so far as to assert that, for any concrete action a person can perform, I can turn it into an algorithm that any virtual person could perform.

The programs do this a bit differently than humans do, though, because they have no grasp of the context. I mean, your computer is "perceiving" all kinds of things right now if you want to use a loose enough sense of that word, e.g., all the pictures and documents you've saved on it or viewed. The whole thing gets translated into bits switching on and off at the bottom, anyway. The problem is that it has no idea what these things are.

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By accepting that the answer to the question of Choice" somehow settles the question of Free Will, the Objectivist will lose every time.

A key difference comes in the arena of knowledge. The animals look out at the world and can come to know relatively few things. The particular trees amongst where they walk, where the stream is, where they've found food before. In so far as what they know, they cannot be mistaken, whereas.man converts his perceptual knowledge into conceptual, and can be mistaken, he needs a means of checking his knowledge. If man's conceptual knowledge were automatic, the question of error wouldn't come up. Man is free to correct his errors, or evade that effort. He is free to choose. In this manner, it is a contextual issue that clearly differs from the dog picking a toy with which to play. The animals perceptual knowledge is automatic. The metaphysical world about them and whatever sense of self they may have is given. For them, existence exists, Only man has demonstrated the ability to grasp this conceptually.

Edited by dream_weaver
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@Dream #95

 

In post 73 I linked to a paper by Lee Pierson.  The following is the abstract:

 

What is Consciousness For? Lee Pierson and Monroe Trout Copyright © 2005 Abstract: The answer to the title question is, in a word, volition. Our hypothesis is that the ultimate adaptive function of consciousness is to make volitional movement possible. All conscious processes exist to subserve that ultimate function. Thus, we believe that all conscious organisms possess at least some volitional capability. Consciousness makes volitional attention possible; volitional attention, in turn, makes volitional movement possible. There is, as far as we know, no valid theoretical argument that consciousness is needed for any function other than volitional movement and no convincing empirical evidence that consciousness performs any other ultimate function. Consciousness, via volitional action, increases the likelihood that an organism will direct its attention, and ultimately its movements, to whatever is most important for its survival and reproduction.

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A key difference comes in the arena of knowledge. The animals look out at the world and can come to know relatively few things. The particular trees amongst where they walk, where the stream is, where they've found food before. In so far as what they know, they cannot be mistaken, whereas.man converts his perceptual knowledge into conceptual, and can be mistaken, he needs a means of checking his knowledge.

I don't think this quite sounds right. For one, perceptual knowledge, for lack of a better term, isn't itself perceptual like seeing a tree, but is representational as in it is a cognitive map or a visualization. Not conceptual either. In one sense it's automatic, as I said about innate capacities, but in another sense, it can fail to map anything at all about the world. It likely requires some form of attention and therefore focus on the world to provide mental content like a mapping.

 

Many birds navigate by means of a mapping, often based upon position of stars at night. The mapping can fail to represent the world if you alter the stimuli and raise them with a false night sky. They won't be able to navigate as they should. To be sure, perception is automatic, but any step past that can be wrong and mistaken. I just want to be careful about how I label the representations an animal holds.

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From the Objectivist Ethics:
 

The higher organisms possess a much more potent form of consciousness: they possess the faculty of retaining sensations, which is the faculty of perception. A "perception" is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism, which gives it the ability to be aware, not of single stimuli, but of entities, of things. An animal is guided, not merely by immediate sensations, but by percepts. Its actions are not single, discrete responses to single, separate stimuli, but are directed by an integrated awareness of the perceptual reality confronting it. It is able to grasp the perceptual concretes immediately present and it is able to form automatic perceptual associations, but it can go no further. It is able to learn certain skills to deal with specific situations, such as hunting or hiding, which the parents of the higher animals teach their young. But an animal has no choice in the knowledge and the skills that it acquires; it can only repeat them generation after generation. And an animal has no choice in the standard of value directing its actions: its senses provide it with an automatic code of values, an automatic knowledge of what is good for it or evil, what benefits or endangers its life. An animal has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade it. In situations for which its knowledge is inadequate, it perishes—as, for instance, an animal that stands paralyzed on the track of a railroad in the path of a speeding train. But so long as it lives, an animal acts on its knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice: it cannot suspend its own consciousness-it cannot choose not to perceive—it cannot evade its own perceptions—it cannot ignore its own good, it cannot decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer.

 

With regard to an animals knowledge, I don't think what I was trying to say differs greatly from the Eioul.

 

More generally, I can't help but notice she writes this whole passage without using the term "volition" (although she does mention choice, but in regard in extending its knowledge, or with regard to the stand of value directing it's actions.)

 

From chapter 2 of OPAR:


Volition, accordingly, is not an independent philosophic principle, but a corollary of the axiom of consciousness. Not every consciousness has the faculty of volition. Every fallible, conceptual consciousness, however, does have it.

 

So volition is not delimited to conceptual consciousness, although not every consciousness has the faculty of it. This makes sense in light of many of the points brought up by Devil's Advocate and New Buddha. And although the point brought up in the appendix deals with a question on abstraction as volitional, a more minimal, primitive form of volition is what has been giving me difficulty on this topic.

 

In the Appendix—Abstraction as Measurement-Omission from ITOE, addressing abstraction as volitional:

 

And although I hesitate to talk about volition on the preconceptual level—because the subject isn't aware of it in those terms—even a preconceptual infant has the power to look around or not look, to listen or not listen. He has a certain minimal, primitive form of volition over the function of his senses. But volition in the full sense of a conscious choice, and a choice which he can observe by introspection, begins when he forms concepts—at the stage where he has a sufficient conceptual vocabulary to begin to form sentences and draw conclusions, when he can say consciously, in effect, "This table is larger than that one"—that he has to do volitionally. If he doesn't want to, he can skip that necessity, and you can observe empirically that too many people do, on too wide a scale.

 

In the way that value has a broad sense of anything that is pursued is a value to the pursuer. Rational values delineate it to the context of what is proper to man.

Volition with regard to movement in the environment is a broader context that to limit it to application in the realm of cognition.

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That last quote from ITOE is a lot closer to my thinking. The first passage is okay, but it needs to be parsed for details. The broader point is that animals besides humans lack the ability to create a code of values, and are only really stuck with concrete bound thinking. The tough part is what Rand means by "perceptual associations" and "power to extend its knowledge". or if "no choice in the knowledge it acquires" means no choice is needed at all. ITOE seems to answer these, or shows Rand thought about it a lot more later, reaching a perspective on consciousness oriented on cognition as a process of identification. I might expand on this later.

"Not every consciousness has the faculty of volition. Every fallible, conceptual consciousness, however, does have it."
Does Peikoff argue this? I'd say consciousness of all kinds is fallible in the sense of not being automatically error-free. If the choice to focus is necessary to act at all, it's because it allows for attention onto the world AND internal mental states. If there is no attention on internal mental states, there is no consciousness. If there are no mental states, there is no consciousness. I don't see where or how Peikoff can argue that non-conceptual consciousness lacks volition.

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