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Thanks for this, LJI have bolded the last part of your argument because it will help me show later that, although mostly compelling, it is made circular by a false premise. Correct me if I’m simplifying too much, but what you are saying in a nutshell is this:
1. The mind is our cognitive faculties
2. Our cognitive faculties are not infallible (as is exemplified in false beliefs)
3. The fallibility of the cognitive faculties, as exemplified in false beliefs, limits freedom
4. Therefore the mind limits freedom
5. Therefore you are only as free as your mind allows you to be.
The fallacy happens in the transition from 4 to 5. Insofar as the cognitive faculties are used in the formulation of judgements and those judgements inform actions, the cognitive faculties do have an impact on what actions we choose to perform. I understand that this could be said to amount to a limiting of freedom. But it’s not really “the mind” as a separate entity that limits it, or “allows” the self to be more or less free. It is mistaken, I think, to assume that the locus of freedom is inside the mind.
The first reason is circularity of argument: you can’t impact upon those fallible faculties by “becoming aware” of their fallibility without making use of those very faculties, i.e. you can’t become more free by using what limits your freedom in order to improve what limits your freedom. The second reason is infinite regress: if we envisage that the mind has the power to “allow” the self to be more or less free, we must inevitably ask what gives the mind that power, and come to the conclusion that the mind itself has freedom. But this seems absurd. Surely the cognitive faculties do not belong to the mind as a separate entity, but to human being itself, and “the mind” is only a manner of referring to those cognitive faculties insofar as they feature in the everyday decision-making of human being.
Incidentally, this is close to what Sartre called the transcendence of the ego. The ego (the self) must not be thought of as “benefiting” from some kind of magical access to mind, or consciousness, or whatever word may all too quickly be assumed to exist as a separate entity that “contains thoughts” or “possesses freedom”; instead the ego, according to Sartre, is the transcendental unity of the cognitive faculties that you mentioned in your post. It is essentially a neo-Kantian argument but so far as the discussion of freedom is concerned, I still believe it to be the most convincing one. A useful way to consider this is to suggest that my mind is not an entity separate from myself, to which I have access to, but simply one way of looking at myself, and of talking about the single entity that is I. The I, the "subject" of freedom, is not the mind but the transcendence of the ego.
Let me know your thoughts!
Good morning Ren. Ok, I have concluded that, in order to really converse with you in depth about this topic, I'd need to do several weeks, if not months, of reading to brush up my knowledge in this field to a respectable enough level. I'd love to do that, as I see it as a challenge and I welcome every opportunity to learn, but I'm simply unwilling to put the time necessary right now. I have a thesis to finish. I shouldn't get sidetracked (again) into interesting projects that are meaningful but ultimately averse to my overall goal. Now, that said, here goes...
"Insofar as the cognitive faculties are used in the formulation of judgements and those judgements inform actions, the cognitive faculties do have an impact on what actions we choose to perform. I understand that this could be said to amount to a limiting of freedom." Yes, that is essentially what I'm saying.
Your first point comes down to not seeing 'the mind' as a separate entity from 'the self', they are one and the same? Yeah fine with me, I don't see them as separate either. We are our minds. (In fact, according to neuroscience, we are our brains...)
I'll grant you that that makes the 5th statement rather superfluous, 'you are only as free as you allow yourself to be', but not necessarily false.
Your second point: "You cannot impact upon the fallible faculties by 'becoming aware' of their fallibility without making use of the same faculties": I don't entirely understand what you mean here. Do you mean that in order to become aware of and correct false beliefs, you'd have to use reason, but your reasoning contains false beliefs, so you'll never uncover those false beliefs? If so ->
Agreed, you do make use of those very same cognitive faculties, I believe we call this learning
What else do you propose? What other faculties do we have to our disposal?"Becoming aware" does not necessarily have to happen on it's own accord (and I also never argued as such). One can be made aware of false beliefs and change them by reading a book containing a compelling argument, or having a discussion and being proven wrong, or by going into therapy, etc. In such cases I suppose we use the cognitive faculties of other people to correct our own.
Or we can simply have a nice run in with reality. (This only works for correcting certain false beliefs, though. After all, if it worked for all, we wouldn't have any false beliefs to begin with.)
Your third point of infinite regress. See my answer to point one.
Sartre's Transcendence of ego.. the who what now. BUTTERFLIES. This is outside the scope of my knowledge and as such I will not cover this.
