[anticlimacus]

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past--Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

I think the latter quote by Marx is fairly reasonable, however it doesn't resolve the question of agency. The question of agency concerns whether or not actors, or to what degree agents are originators of their actions. Agency also concerns reflexivity, or the capacity to be both self-consciously purposive in our actions and to be able to give an account of them. So the basic question is: To what extent do actors have agency, and to what extent are actors aware of what they are doing and why they are doing what they do?

[Nattering Nabob]

We believe in free will, not because there is any logical reason to do so, but because we want to or because something internal tells us to believe in free will...

In this regard it is no different from a religious belief...

[anticlimacus]

We believe in free will, not because there is any logical reason to do so, but because we want to or because something internal tells us to believe in free will...

In this regard it is no different from a religious belief...

The feeling of control over one's actions and thoughts, the feeling of being at home in one's body and actions and being the source of them, is different from a belief system, I think. "Free-will" is incorporated into a belief system. Because an agents actions and thoughts are most immediate to him/her there is an experience of control; that, to an extent, they are "my" thoughts, "my" actions; a feeling that I, in fact, possess them and they are incorporated into "my" identity. But, as the good Radiohead line says, "Just cause you feel it, doesn't mean it's there"

[Nattering Nabob]

The feeling of control over one's actions and thoughts, the feeling of being at home in one's body and actions and being the source of them, is different from a belief system, I think.

I said religious belief, not religious belief system...

[MB.]

To what extent do actors have agency, and to what extent are actors aware of what they are doing and why they are doing what they do?

The question of extent in this case is not very useful. Generally speaking all historical events can be conceived of as involving some degree of synthesis between agency and structure. Agency is modified by structure and structure by agency. The process is continual and ongoing.

[anticlimacus]

The question of extent in this case is not very useful. Generally speaking all historical events can be conceived of as involving some degree of synthesis between agency and structure. Agency is modified by structure and structure by agency. The process is continual and ongoing.

But this too is not helpful. Anthony Giddens makes the same argument in his theory of structuration. The problem is that he cannot tell us what is the action of an agent and what is the structure--as M. Archer critiqued him, he conflates structure and agency, to the point that all we have is confusion. I see you doing the same thing here. All you have said is that there is structure and agency and that they reproduce each other--well again, to what extent are agents determined by structure and to what extent can they act otherwise?

Also is it such a good thing to ontologize structure? There is a part of Levi-Strauss that sought not to ontologize structure, but employed it as a method for understanding action. Perhaps this should be the aim of using "structure," rather than saying that it is something real existing in the world. What there is, instead, are a bunch of different practices--structure is a sociological tool for understanding these practices and their logic.

[BurrsWogdon]

This last exchange reminds me a little of nature vs nurture.

Could responsibility be the logic behind a belief in free will?

While an almost palpable sense of free will might not be enough to be convincing of its existence, what of the ostensible reflection of my free will in the reaction of others. Even my dog doesn't seem to be positive that I am committed to something determined. I don't know how structure might have effected him. In fact, I am no master of the concept of structure... or agency.

Non the less, I guess I have an opinion. I'd say an actor has the potential for agency with respect to the evaluation of various options within possibilities already generated and developed.

I don't know how to describe my concept of the nature of free will. I don't think of it as derivative of God. Not in the biblical sense. Nor do I think of it as metaphysical exactly. I might think of it as physical. It is part of the material brain but not matter. Energy. Intelligent energy. I think of it as energy seeded amidst the emergence of life and intelligence on earth. I don't think of it as evolutionary either -not as an evolved biological property. Perhaps matured through energetic exchange. So while the options compile, so does the capacity to evaluate them.

[Rosas98]

I like to study phenomena in terms of interaction within a network of humans and nonhumans (for example science, or technological artifact). In these interactions new agents are created. For example, a gun + a man creates a new actor, a gunman. People interpret this new actor often along one line of an extreme. Anti-gun ownership: People are morally good, a gun changes them in evil persons. Pro-gun ownership ´guns do not kill people, people do´: Guns are morally neutral, it is just the person who is good or evil.

We create our nonhumans, but we do not have full control over them. They are agents to the extent that they alter our associations with people and things.

[LetsTalkAboutIt]

We believe in free will, not because there is any logical reason to do so, but because we want to or because something internal tells us to believe in free will...

In this regard it is no different from a religious belief...

People worship free will as if it were as some sort of god.

Thus worshiping something as a god entails people don't want free will.

[anticlimacus]

I like to study phenomena in terms of interaction within a network of humans and nonhumans (for example science, or technological artifact). In these interactions new agents are created. For example, a gun + a man creates a new actor, a gunman. People interpret this new actor often along one line of an extreme. Anti-gun ownership: People are morally good, a gun changes them in evil persons. Pro-gun ownership ´guns do not kill people, people do´: Guns are morally neutral, it is just the person who is good or evil.

We create our nonhumans, but we do not have full control over them. They are agents to the extent that they alter our associations with people and things.

I have not read much network theory, but I wonder what you might think of this criticism of it by Bourdieu:

It is [the] structure that determines the possibility or the impossibility...of observing the establishment of linkages that express and sustain the existence of networks. The task of science is to uncover the structure of the distribution of species of capital which tends to determine the structure of individual or collective stances taken, through the interests and dispositions it conditions. In network analysis, the study of these underlying structures has been sacrificed to the analysis of the particular linkages (between agents or institutions) and flows (of information, resources, services, etc.) through which they become visible.

[Wellsy]

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/determinism.htm

People “making their own history” means people, in whatever social position they occupy, taking action for reasons which are generally well-founded given the circumstances they find themselves in. The conditions in which you find yourself may mean that there is only one rational thing to do, but you still have to choose to do that, you don’t have to. A defence of free will must also respond to the fact that one’s needs and desires and the concepts by means of which one grasps them are among that which is given and transmitted from the past, but this still does not mean that human action is caused. It is merely subject to constraints.
…
“Freedom of will is not freedom from motives.” Yes, though the ability to educate one’s own motives is crucial to the attainment of a genuinely free will, something which may or may not be attained to some degree in the course of an adult life.
The nervous system is an elaborate system of stimulus-response reactions, a system which to a certain degree is ‘self-constructed’ under conditions not of the subject’s choosing. The human organism taken as a whole cannot be described as a stimulus-response object because through personal development people have constructed an elaborate system of stimulus-response apparatuses which mediates between the stimulus acting on the person and the person’s response. This elaborate system is the material basis of consciousness and identity. Thus, when a person responds either with conscious awareness or with an immediate, conditioned response, the laws of biology are not violated. Does this mean that consciousness (i.e., thought) causes the subject’s actions insofar as the action is executed with conscious awareness? All the natural scientific evidence points to the fact that thoughts cannot be causes of material effects.
However, it is impossible to describe this process without invoking a subject who constructs conditioned reflexes and uses auxiliary stimuli – tools and signs, voluntary acts. It seems from Vygotsky’s explanation that the subject which exercises volition in training its reactions and mastering them is itself an elaborate complex of conditioned reflexes which in infancy was deliberately trained by adults but increasingly took over its own self-construction within the context of ideological and social conditions outside of the subject’s control. ‘The self’ and ‘thought’ is a different level of description of the same object described in terms of conditioned reflexes and apparatuses of reflexes organized around motives.
So it appears that the self can at one and the same time exercise free will with “maximum freedom and completely voluntary acts,” and be obedient to the laws of biology. The higher psychological functions cannot be described, nor a causal explanation of the functioning of the formulated, without recourse to the language of voluntary actions, that is, free will.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Article_on_Teleology.pdf

The distinction between teleology and causality in each case is not cut and dry, but the principle is clear enough: insofar as a response to a situation passes through a thinking consciousness, it is teleological not causal. Nothing forces a person to make any particular response to their situation; they simply have certain options. Hegel takes the whole of the Philosophy of Right to elaborate how the will can become genuinely and fully free, and it entails not just the powers of an individual but a social transformation. Nonetheless, insofar as a person weighs their options and has insight into their own desires and the conditions of their action, then only an account of their will formation can make their action intelligible. An enquiry into the conditions in which they acted
5

can make their action intelligible only to the extent of showing what would be rational response. But the person must still decide and their response may not be rational.
…
The sociologist Anthony Giddens claimed that the predictability manifested in social life is largely ‘made to happen’ by strategically placed social actors, not in spite of them or ‘behind their backs’. Far from people being driven to do what they do by remote or invisible ‘structural forces’, Giddens showed that “all explanations will involve at least implicit references both to the purposive, reasoning behavior of agents and to its intersection with constraining and enabling features of the social and material contexts” (1984, p. 179). Giddens’ research shows that individuals are generally well aware of the possible consequences of their actions, and are experts in the often lamentable situations in which they find themselves. Sociologists use Game Theory to study the various traps which confront people when are deemed to act as isolated individuals and they do gain certain insights into social problems. However, human society is not an aggregate of isolated atoms, and all manner of collective action from neighborhood solidarity to government action create and change the arrangements within which such ‘rational actors’ act. The situations in which the individuals make their decisions are the products of policy of strategic institutions. The rationality at work in the creation of institutions and customs is not a ‘univocal’ reason, but reflects a diversity of social interests and identities.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/searle.pdf

But let us make a slight revision to Searle’s assumptions. Let us assume that thinking is not something going on exclusively between the ears, but on the contrary, that other parts of our body and things and people outside of us participate, in however small a way does not matter, in consciousness. Let us assume that the brain is not a closed system. Let us suppose for example that the presence of something in my field of vision (for example my address book), participates in my consciousness (for example, remembering my friend’s phone number). That is, that the change from one state of consciousness to another depends in some measure on something which is not between my ears, and is therefore not subject solely to the biology of the brain.

If then, my own actions manifest human freedom (which is just what is to be proved), then the things I have in my field of vision at any given time, not to mention my economic situation, the friends and family I have, the books and computers I have at my disposal, my state of health, etc., etc., are manifestations of my own free activity. If we allow that these things, manifestations in part of my own free activity, participate in determining my thinking at any given moment, then nothing more is necessary to establish that my consciousness is in part the result of my own freedom, and is not determined by physics alone. The physical environment in which I live, inclusive of the internal constitution of my body, is the manifestation of both lawful physical activity and wilful human activity, including my own previous interactions with other people and things. If my consciousness is constituted, even in part, by states of this extended system, then my consciousness is not subject solely to the laws of physics – wholly but not solely.

This pushes the logician’s puzzle back one degree. If I ever had free will, then that free will is embedded in the environment in which I now live. There would still have to have been (for the logician) an original act of free will. So our logician still has a problem: in order for me to manifest free will in the use of something outside the brain in the determination of my consciousness, then I must have acted as a free person at some time in the past. This leads to an infinite regression: in order to be free I must already be free.

This is the same problem to which Johann Fichte addressed himself in 1799.

His solution was this: it is necessary for some other person to recognise me as a free person, to call upon me to exercise my freedom. Free will therefore does not
derive from the internal constitution of the human organism, but rather from the demands of other people. Free will is not an innate property of the human body, but a social product ‒ the creation of social formations in which people were required to act as free agents.

Does this resolve the problem of John, sitting alone at his writing desk, and just deciding to lift his arm? In this scenario he receives no impulse or demand from outside, it is entirely about a process going on inside his head plus his capacity to control his own body. Growing up as human beings, learning to exercise our freedom, we learn to manipulate our own minds in just the same way that we can manipulate objects. We learn to do this by internalising the use of objects, particularly artefacts. For example, by pointing to the letters on a page and listening to someone read them out, by copying the sounds they make, then reading aloud by ourselves, we may learn to read silently, and even memorise whole epic poems and study the conundrums of analytical philosophers.

So we actually can intentionally “operate” our own brains, much as we can operate a car, which remains all the while subject to the laws of physics.

There is no border line with physical/law-governed on this side and free/voluntary on that side. Our growing up as human beings within a culture means that we are taught, and we learn to control the inner psychological and biological processes of our own bodies. Our bodies are a realm in which the determinate/physical is mixed in with the indeterminate and free.

The point (for me) is that we gain this freedom to control our own bodies only mediately via other people and the products of the culture around us. The question is: are we exercising genuinely free self-determination, or are we simply acting in a way that is determined by the means that the culture places at our disposal.

And that is a question which is not so easily answered. Perhaps Nature will trump Culture in the end, but it is not a trivial question.