a founder of the codex

Volition

Voluntaria eligens·the Choosing Knot

From Latin voluntas, will, and eligere, to choose, for a will that picks one way out of many.

Level: Conceptorganism
Book: Pathematathe treatise on the passions
Phylum: Forceimage schema
Class: Kernelits spark
Niche: Consumerother ideas
Mode: Moralityhow it keeps existing
Stage: Matureindividuated
Status: Living
Habitat: Market

Its kinds · Roget, 1852: Individual Volition · Wilkins, 1668: Spiritual Action · WordNet, 1990: Cognition · Llull, 1308: E · Man

Choosing Knot, the whole specimen — Plate XLI. Voluntaria eligens, the whole specimen.

An act is willed when it follows from a choice the agent makes after weighing desires and reasons, and the will shows itself most plainly where it fails to carry the act through.

An act is one's own when it follows from a choice one would stand behind.

behavior Hesitates with every limb drawn in, then moves all at once in one direction and lives with where it lands.

provocation

When did you last do what you had decided against, and who decided?

Each draw is the being derived afresh by the current laws at another seed (laws §11); the chosen one leads (where they sit in the morphospace).

I Dissection

Each organ answers one question about the idea. The framed one, its kernel, is the dominant organ: the being's class, the one the idea could not lose and stay itself.

Kernel of Volition — Fig. 1. Kernel
Prime mover
❦ dominant organ
Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?
Its premise is that an act can come from a choice the agent makes and owns, so the act belongs to them and they answer for it.¹
drawn as: spark · view: microscope

Boundary of Volition — Fig. 2. Boundary
Unwilling addict
What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?
It is defined against compulsion, the act forced from outside or driven by a craving the agent disowns, as in the unwilling addict.^{1, 4}
drawn as: skin · view: transparent

Intake of Volition — Fig. 3. Intake
Second-order desires
What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?
It feeds on desires and reasons, and on desires about desires, the wish to be moved by some wants and freed from others.⁴
drawn as: nerve net · view: detached

Mechanism of Volition — Fig. 4. Mechanism
Crossroads
How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?
It deliberates, weighing means toward an end until one course prevails, and the chosen idea, held steadily in mind, sets the body moving.^{1, 3}
drawn as: flush · view: series

Output of Volition — Fig. 5. Output
Rubicon
What does it make possible, visible or knowable?
It issues in action, a movement begun on purpose, though the brain's readiness for that movement rises a fraction of a second before the felt moment of deciding.⁵
drawn as: signal · view: at work

Dispersal of Volition — Fig. 6. Dispersal
Guilty mind
What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?
It travels through consequences, the praise, blame, reward and punishment that hold an agent to what was chosen and carry responsibility into law.¹
drawn as: contagion · view: in situ

Decay of Volition — Fig. 7. Decay
Unruly horse
What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?
It fails in akrasia, seeing the better course and taking the worse, a will divided against itself. It leaves the old question of how free it ever was.^{1, 2}
drawn as: afterglow · view: pressed

II Meaning associations

No relations recorded yet.

descent membership food web resemblance or friction

Lineage

A founder, dissected by hand.

Kin

same kind in Roget Patience

same kind in Wilkins Faith, Fear, Nostalgia, Silence, Knowing Trust, Witnessed Relief, Witnessed Relief (Mycelia), Fear's Breath

same kind in WordNet Apophenia, Dream, Faith, Memory, Qualia, Silence, Afterlistening, Simultaneous Remembering, Hesychology, Subtractive Phenomenology

same kind in Llull Echolalia, Memory, Nostalgia, Placebo, Presence, Prophecy, Solitude, Knowing Trust, Self-Fulfilling Alarm, Tongue Horizon, Witnessed Relief, Witnessed Relief (Mycelia), Commemorative Revision, The Shared Cell, Simultaneous Remembering, Hesychology

same phylum Fear, Fire, Storm, Self-Fulfilling Alarm, Self-Ending Order

same dominant organ Entanglement, Entelechy, Geomancy, Qualia, Salt, Syllable, Symmetry, Vertigo, Knowing Trust, Hesychology

Genome

choice
will
deliberation
agency
akrasia

III In the world

Echoes

Libet's experiment on the readiness potential
a New Year's resolution
Odysseus bound to the mast to hear the Sirens
a plea of diminished responsibility in court

IV Record

How it was drawn

its draw 1, a point in the morphospace (laws §8), drawn by flux-2-klein-4b.safetensors.

axis	value
book	pathemata
symmetry	spiral
organization	solitary
silhouette	spire
scale	microscopic
proportion	swollen
growth	gnomonic
articulation	telescoping latent
openness	solid latent
skeleton	spicules latent
locomotion	gliding
pattern	rosettes latent
coloration	countershaded
substance	metal
surface	scaled
palette	meadow
luminosity	none
transparency	translucent latent
gesture	coils
unity	composite latent
modality	possible latent
causation	final latent
determinacy	crisp latent
fusion	sprouting
anomaly	larger inside
graft	keyholes
technique	gouache
viewpoint	above
value	unmarked latent
balance	unmarked latent
density	unmarked latent
rhythm	unmarked latent
saturation	muted latent
appendages	lanterns, valves
anchor (body)	a sea angel, a translucent sea snail swimming on two wing-like lobes
anchor (detail)	a Lichtenberg figure, a branching tree of discharge burned into a surface

Sources

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, books 3 and 7 (4th century BCE)
Augustine, Confessions, book 8 (c. 400)
William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890), chapter 26, Will
Harry G. Frankfurt, Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person (Journal of Philosophy, 1971)
Benjamin Libet, Curtis A. Gleason, Elwood W. Wright and Dennis K. Pearl, Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (Brain, 1983)

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