A Conversation in the Senior Common Room (Where Responsibility Has Been Placed on the Table)
The fire continues to behave in a law-abiding yet oddly expressive manner. Professor Quillibrace regards it as a model citizen of constrained actualisation. Mr Blottisham appears ready to hold it morally accountable. Miss Elowen Stray watches the layering of processes with quiet interest.
Blottisham:
Right. Enough abstraction. Here’s a practical one: Are we in control of our choices?
Surely this time we must land on a proper answer. Yes or no.
Quillibrace:
Ah. The binary returns, refreshed and optimistic.
Stray:
It does feel urgent, though. It matters for responsibility, ethics, even how we understand ourselves.
Blottisham:
Exactly. Either we choose freely—or everything is determined. We can’t have both.
Quillibrace:
We can certainly have both. What we cannot have is both within the same flattened description.
1. The Shape of the Demand
Stray:
The question assumes that choices are things we can isolate—discrete events to be explained.
Blottisham:
Yes. A decision happens, and we ask: did I make it, or was it caused?
Quillibrace:
Which implies:
- that “choice” is an object,
- that causation applies uniformly across all levels,
- and that freedom and causation are competing explanations of the same phenomenon.
Blottisham:
Naturally. That’s the whole point.
Quillibrace:
It is certainly the whole problem.
2. The Great Flattening
Stray:
So what’s being assumed underneath?
Quillibrace:
A rather enthusiastic collapse of structure:
- that choices are discrete and isolable,
- that causation operates identically at all levels,
- that freedom and causation belong to the same explanatory stratum,
- that agency is either fully present or entirely absent,
- and that “control” is a single property that applies globally.
Blottisham:
You say that as if it were unreasonable.
Quillibrace:
I say it as one might describe a building that has misplaced several floors.
3. A Minor Issue of Missing Strata
Stray:
So the problem is de-stratification?
Quillibrace:
Precisely. The question collapses multiple relational strata into a single causal plane.
At minimum, we are dealing with:
- Physical constraints — the systemic conditions under which anything occurs.
- Instantiation — the event level at which actions actualise.
- Individuation — the history of participation that shapes a person’s available potentials.
Blottisham:
And the question treats all of these as… the same thing?
Quillibrace:
As competing explanations of a single event, yes.
Stray:
Which produces the illusion that causation must either eliminate or explain away agency.
Quillibrace:
Exactly. A category error with impressive persistence.
4. If We Restore the Structure
Blottisham:
Then what is a “choice,” if not a discrete, self-contained event?
Quillibrace:
Something considerably less theatrical.
A choice is:
- an instantiation within constrained systems,
- shaped by prior patterns of individuation,
- realised through interacting semiotic and material constraints.
Stray:
So agency isn’t about escaping causation?
Quillibrace:
No. It is about how constraints are organised.
Agency consists in:
- the availability of alternative trajectories,
- the capacity for variation within bounds,
- the stabilisation of decision-patterns across instances.
Blottisham:
So freedom is…?
Quillibrace:
A relational degree of constrained variability.
Blottisham:
That sounds suspiciously like not absolute freedom.
Quillibrace:
It has the advantage of existing.
5. The Collapse of the Binary
Blottisham:
So we don’t get a yes or no?
Quillibrace:
Only if one insists on asking a malformed question.
The binary depends on:
- treating all causation as one layer,
- equating freedom with absence of constraint,
- collapsing individuation, instantiation, and physical conditions,
- and demanding a global property of “control.”
Remove these, and the question no longer divides cleanly.
Stray:
So instead of a verdict, we get a re-description?
Quillibrace:
Yes.
Agency is:
- distributed,
- constrained,
- and stratified across systems of realisation.
Blottisham:
That is deeply inconvenient for courtroom rhetoric.
Quillibrace:
Reality has long been indifferent to legal tidiness.
6. Why the Binary Persists
Blottisham:
And yet it still feels like I either chose something or I didn’t.
Quillibrace:
Of course. The attraction is well-supported.
- Moral systems prefer binary attribution.
- Causation is often treated as globally uniform.
- Introspection presents a unified sense of authorship.
- Cultural narratives valorise “control” as a singular property.
Stray:
So the feeling of unity comes from integration across strata?
Quillibrace:
Yes. Not from a single causal level doing all the work.
Blottisham:
So my sense of being “in control” is…?
Quillibrace:
An effect of coordinated processes, not a metaphysical exemption.
Closing
Blottisham:
So “Are we in control of our choices?” turns out to be—
Quillibrace:
—a question that collapses stratified organisation into a single causal plane, and then demands a binary answer from the wreckage.
Stray:
And once the strata are restored?
Quillibrace:
The question stops functioning as a yes/no problem.
What remains is structure.
Blottisham:
Which is less satisfying than a decisive answer.
Quillibrace:
Only if one prefers clarity to accuracy.
Stray (quietly):
It’s not that agency disappears. It becomes something that has to be traced across levels.
Quillibrace:
Miss Stray, once again, declines the convenience of simplification.
Blottisham:
I suppose I shall have to give up the idea of absolute control.
Quillibrace:
You may keep a great deal of control.
Blottisham (brightening):
Ah!
Quillibrace:
Just not the kind that requires the rest of the universe to stop participating.
No comments:
Post a Comment