Cont'd
The expression of free will is the essence of all psychology because it is the essence of all particularly, or uniquely, human activity; e.g., life, love, and thinking. Then free will is essentially the common basis, or better, that which creates the common basis of values. The limitation of free will to man alone does not eliminate animals, or inorganic systems, simply because of the association of man's body, and the fact that man must express his will through it in order to understand, to think about, to know anything. We defined psychology in terms of a common basis -- "values", and now we find another "common basis", or essence, of psychology and the distinctly human characteristics of life, love, and thinking. The conclusion that must be drawn from these observations is that the material of psychology, all behavior -- is a result of value determinations as formerly indicated, and that such behavior is the expression of either the values of the material world, (e.g., survival value, which from the theological view presented would be the expression of the Will of the Spirit which pervades the material world and of which the animal body is a part), or an expression of the will of the individual. Since the only individual who has a "will" is man, animals can only respond to the "will" of the material world. But man has animal characteristics and can respond to either one, the other, or both "wills". In other words, "free" will establishes values on either the unconscious, "subconscious", or conscious levels depending upon the view of which "will" is being followed.
Returning to subjective considerations, such as our thought experiment, will give us some feeling for our thoughts, and some insights into how the thinking process, and learning, are dependent upon the expression of free will. Consider how we learned such a concept as "solidity" -- by touching many things and arbitrarily calling, or accepting, this symbol "solidity" as describing the common feeling we obtained from the various things we touched. It should be noted that we obtained our concepts of temperature, hot, cold, and many other concepts in a similar fashion. It should also be noted that our concept, (its completeness, and its usefulness -- its meaning) depends upon the nature and the number of the various things we touched to develop the concept. For example, it would be impossible to get a very good idea of "hot" in the arctic (with no matches). It would be impossible to get a good idea of temperature without touching things that are "hot" and "cold": sensations are easily confused when outside a particular narrow temperature range (and out of sight) which indicates a common property we call temperature. The physicist goes a step further. With our concept of "solidity", he adds to the associations of touching or feeling anything "material" and calls this "mass". He thus arbitrarily takes some substance, defines it as his standard, and compares everything else to it. If he wishes he assigns numbers, and applies mathematics.
Taking a negative view, let us consider an individual who is unable to express his will. We could say that he, or his will, is frustrated in the truest sense of the word. If he is continually frustrated without relief, or with little relief, he becomes "neurotic". As this process continues, the need for the expression of his will becomes more and more important until a crisis is reached in which he feels compelled to express himself very definitely. Eventually he will, he must. If he can't find any harmless, or acceptable, way to express himself, the result could be an ineffective, or a "psychotic" action. The individual is trying to reverse the process of frustration, and therefore, such action is definitive, or at least an indication of what's frustrating him. The most important thing though as far as the individual is concerned is to assert himself; and, many times he is unaware himself of exactly what the problem is, since this process usually occurs in the sub-conscious, or unconscious. If it was conscious at all, it would have been repressed, or he would not be frustated, but perhaps angry instead.
We have noted earlier that understanding such behavior is dependent upon understanding and interpreting the symbolisms employed. This problem is further complicated by the necessity of determining whether he is responding to a repressed conscious, a sub-conscious, or an un-conscious problem. Regardless of the difficulies involved, we can recognize the most important, and interesting, aspect. Psychotic behavior may be an attempt to correct neurotic problems; but, if such an assertion of will is not harmless, or tolerable, the attempt is ineffective, and may either relieve, or increase, the frustation and neuroses.
It is also interesting to note that neuroses can occur on an unconscious level, a non-human level, so that animals can show or respond to conflicting stimuli which can be called "neurotic". Psychotic behavior on the other hand is distinctly human activity. There is no psychotic who is hopeless. In fact, they demonstrate their determination to correct their problem -- to live, to be human -- by the very acts through which they condemn themselves in the eyes of their peers. The problem is not only that of the psychotic. Certainly if anyone is to "blame" he must share the blame. But his society is also to blame. That is to say that a psychoses cannot be produced by the individual alone. There must be at least least one other will forceful enough to frustrate his will. For every individual who performs an abnormal act, two things are indicated. First, he was unable to adjust to a society in some particular way; and that doesn't necessarily make him irresponsible. Second, the society whose purpose is to further the interests of the individuals within it, has failed to some degree. Although it is the individual who must bear the brunt of responsibility for his actions, the society must realize that their norms are not what they should be. The responsibility of the society is not only to correct the irresponsibility of the individual's actions, but also to correct those norms which made it extremely difficult for this individual to adjust. If society refuses to accept the second responsibility, the number of psychotics will always be increasing. Such a process is not only limited to psychotic behavior but to any behavior that is decidedly different. If society would view any extreme action as an attempt to correct some failing of society, although the attempt might be a poor, a wrong, and a dangerous one, the society would leave plenty of indications of what is wrong with it.
Rather than continue looking for all kinds of examples to offer as evidence, I shall simply present a summary of the thinking process as we have used and developed it.
Starting from scratch, we have a stimulus response mechanism which is totally unconscious , and if it remains as such, it is completely meaningless to us; e.g., a muscular twitch. If the response is sufficiently vigorous, there is a feeling associated with it which gives some vague impression which we can ignore or respond to it. Besides responding to the stimuli, we can arbitrarily attach some emotional or feeling value to this reaction, such as pleasant, painful, etc. This is not particularly useful with only a single response, or feeling.
We have already noted that responses could be conditioned on the unconscious level, so that it might appear that we could not develop anything very different from animal behavior, by arbitrarily expressing our will in this manner; i.e., by just attaching an emotional, or feeling, value to a reaction. We differentiated such behavior as being sub-conscious, without deciding whether the ability to feel was dependent upon the will. We assumed it to be a passive process, but even as such the will can be, (or actually is) expressed, so that there is no essential difference between the sub-conscious and conscious activity. The sub-conscious is best considered as a fringe area between the conscious and un-conscious, but certainly not as a distinct entity.
To take the next step of understanding the problem of active, conscious activity some subtle distinctions between the will and its expressions were necessary: i.e., the most important of them being the active and passive types of expressions of the same will. Although the "passive" expressions were discussed as simple epi-Phenomenon, (analagous super structures of abstraction from the conditioned responses rendering consciousness of the phenomenon), we also noted that such passive expressions yield the knowledge necessary for the will to "want", to "desire", to "need", etc. The first active expression of the will is simply a desire which is related to the passive expression of will which were needed to form the "feelings"; the active expression in the form of a simple desire could then be maintained, which requires, at the very least, the concomitant maintainence of the passive expressions, or the feelings, in the realm of consciousness.
Though it is possible that such expressions of will can occur without effecting the physical world at all, though it is possible that they can occur completely in the realm of spirit, the maintainance of the desire (the active expression) with the previous passive expression (feeling) of the will seems to also imply the maintenance of the "conditioned response" mechanisms (the unconscious) at least in some representative way (e.g., as "printed-circuits", or "waves"). We cannot establish this as necessarily occuring since the passive expressions of will abstract from the physical world to the spiritual world, i.e., from body to soul, which can be separable (as in death). But while the material (body) and spiritual (soul) are united as a mind, or through the mind, the maintenance of the desire and the maintenance of a representative mechanism certainly does occur simultaneously, and should such a representation persist, it would begin the building of "memory".
Though it is possible that the will could maintain a desire only in the realm of the spirit without the associated physical mechanism or representation, to do so would require knowledge, and at the present stage of man's knowledge, it is not likely that anyone can completely divorce one from the other except to a limited degree.
Man is not yet capable of even describing with anything near completeness all of the processes involved. The processes are so subtle that it is likely that such associations shall remain unconscious (and therefore unknown) for a long time to come -- at least until man can concentrate his will sufficiently well to even attach a feeling to cellular activity and mechanisms.
The important thing right now is that all the active expressions are related to the passive expression of will since the passive expressions are the "material" from which the active expressions are formed and the "material" upon which the will acts. The analogy to the earlier "trinities" (e.g., mind, body, spirit. unconscious, sub-conscious, and conscious) is fairly obvious and they can all be considered to be superimposed upon one another with the added complication:
The next steps follow rather easily. Considering the first conscious expression of will as simply association or desire followed by an ability to maintain that desire, to incorporate a representation of it as memory with the ability to recall, the stage is set for the development of associations of the next conscious expression of will with the previous one leading to association of experiences. We can easily view the phenomenon of maintaining the desire to be an overt expression of will which does not effect the physical world at all, e.g., a dream and yet it is hard to separate the purely subjective expression from the possible physical manifestation of leaving a memory trace. The expression of a desire having a purely subjective effect suggests, and cannot possibly exclude the effect on the body of the thinking subject, and since the body is part of the physical objective world, we must also include the possible effect on the physical, objective and external world. We could then easily account for conscious motor responses and even psycho-somatic phenomenon. Though we are concerned primarily with the active expression of will we are not, and cannot, exclude the passive expression of will which may present the desire as the result of an arbitrary association response mechanism. In terms of "triune" diagrams:
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Or perhaps we might consider the mind from a stimulus response mechanism point of view:
I'm at the point of wondering, what else can I add? The only thing I can see that might be worth while is an indication of the possible general application by considering a hypothetical individual and a single value which we will call a standard. The only assumption we have to make is that the standard can have an effect on the individual. We can then begin to elaborate possibilities.
For example:
1. The individual can have knowledge of the standard.
2. He does not have knowledge of the standard.
Taking the first possibility, we could elaborate two more possibilities:
1.a. The individual is aware of the standard.
1.b. He is unaware of the standard.
Taking the possibility "1.a.", we can consider the possibilities:
1.a.1. He knows the standard consciously.
1.a.2. He "knows" it unconsciously: e.g., by instinct, etc, or, he is aware of the standard to the extent that he is effected by it.
Because the value of knowing the standard is not sufficient to have meaning unless the ability to evaluate is considered, the possibility "1.a.1." implies that he can evaluate, or use, the standard by attaching some value to it, i.e., he can think and act as a free agent.
Then, the individual can value the standard in one of three general ways:
1.a.1.a. - Positive.
1.a.1.b. - Negative.
1.a.1.c. - Neutral.
It should be noted that all three positions can be arrived at either consciously or unconsciously; also, either by instinct, intrinsically, by learning, or by any combination. Without getting involved in the spectrum of possible positive and negative values (i.e., how positive, or how negative) the neutral position indicates a reciprocal relationship on the system which accounts for the possibility number two above and chooses the system. For, certainly if no knowledge exists a positive or negative value is meaningless, but a neutral position is not.
We could go on making assumptions and continue ad finitum. For example, we could build a matrix of reciprocal relationships and implied associations between the individual and society as follows:
AND, we could hypothesize:
Normality = equivalence of values with those of society
Health = Balance of values within the individual, or equivalence with values of the Metaphysical Reality.
Character = Polarity of values as compared against a standard.
But to what end? The possibilities are infinite. The only relevant assumption at the moment is that you have the common sense to apply whatever insight you have gained with such a method to any situation of conflict on any level.
The only important thing to keep in mind is the relationship between "values" and "meaning". It is the relationship between them that makes it very difficult to define either of them, and very difficult to define anything without settling on particular sets of values which in turn establish particular spheres of meaning in conjunction with that particular set of values. "Values" cannot be defined in any other way than we have defined it (by appealing to our own sense of values given to anything which comes into our mind) without destroying the subjective elements which, in essence, constitute the meaning of that "value". The "meaning" of "values" is composed of the "values" in question, i.e., the sense of "values" constitutes "meaning". It follows therefore that the meaning of "meaning" is even more elusive because we must first abstract, or isolate, the values associated with "meaning" and then amalgamate, or combine, them in some way by our intuitive sense of meaning into another composite value to which we assign the symbol "meaning".