Homunculus

Of all the beliefs that shape our thinking, feeling, and acting, few are more pivotal than those that define what it means to be a self. Like our basic assumptions about time, space, purpose, and truth, the assumptions we make about personal identity are instilled early in childhood and almost universally taken for granted from that point on. Despite the work of generations of philosophers and psychologists, we rarely question the validity of such fundamental premises ─ even when there is good reason to suspect they may be distorted.

There is good reason to suspect that our Western no-tion of what it means to be a self is distorted. It may be unrealistic enough, in fact, to qualify as a delusion, i.e., "a false belief regarding the self or persons or objects outside the self that persists despite the facts . . ." (Merriam-Webster). Neither the facts of private introspection nor those of public observation support our traditional concept of who we are. If we go on clinging to our belief despite the evidence, it is perhaps because we find that belief flattering. What may be less obvious ─ and this will become the focus of later chapters ─ is the price we pay for that flattery.

The same belief that prevents us from seeing ourselves accurately has the effect of distorting the way other people see us and the way we perceive them. Those distortions, by altering our most common thoughts and feelings, ultimately find their way into every detail of our personal and inter- personal lives. Because the basic distortion comes out of a cultural belief, it affects people from all ethnic, class, and religious groups. While the delusion is most fully developed in modern Western societies, rudimentary signs of it can be found in every culture of which we have some record.

In the societies of Europe and North America where the delusion holds sway over educated and uneducated alike, it is protected by what Alan Watts called "an un- recognized but mighty taboo ─ [namely] our tacit conspiracy to ignore who, or what, we really are."[i] The term taboo reminds

us that our way of defining ourselves is supported by every institution in society ─ the church, law, family, schools and colleges, government, the media ─ even by the language we speak. In daring to violate that taboo, we risk more than censure. We risk exposing ourselves to the truth of who we really are. That truth, if and when we ever awaken to it, threatens to trigger an upheaval in conscious-ness and, in the process, to transform our most fundamen-tal ideas about what it means to be human.

When I say that we have a distorted idea of who we are, I am not referring to the way we perceive and judge ourselves as individual personalities, although it is obvious that those idiosyncratic self-images have a powerful effect on how we feel and act. Nor am I referring to the Buddhist notion that we are deluded when we fail to see that our true Self transcends our particular body and mind. While the Eastern notion of the Self as the undifferentiated ground of being avoids the error I have in mind, it does so only by denying the reality of the individual personality.

In suggesting that we do not know who we are, I mean simply that the inner spirit or soul we take to be our real self is an illusion. Most of us automatically assume that there exists within each of us an agent or force that serves as stage director ─ overseeing our personal drama from the wings, ready to feed us our lines, cue our entrances, and in general see to it that we play our parts well. There are good reasons, however, for doubting that any such entity exists. When David Hume, the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher, looked into his own mind for such an agent, all he found was a stream of thoughts and sensations, but no self creating or even having those experiences.

Hume was only twenty-eight at the time he published his discovery in A Treatise of Human Nature. The critical passage has been quoted many times before but is impor- tant enough to be quoted again:

"For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception."[ii]

Despite Hume's inability to explain to his own satisfaction what he had found, the suspicion that the self may be no more than an illusion has survived two hundred and fifty years of debate in the West. With the dawn of artificial intelligence and the recent explosion of discoveries in the neurosciences, that suspicion is more alive now than ever before.

What I mean by agent is what writers of a more spiritual age called the soul and what modern psychologists refer to as ego. Despite the difference in coloring, all three terms refer to a common animating principle or entity that stands at the center of our being, directing our thoughts, decisions and moral judgments. More than any feature of personality or physical appearance, it is this soul-ego-agent that we conventionally think of as our real self. It is that which ultimately distinguishes us from each other. When we get right down to it, you are you and I am I because of a difference in agency. We may resemble each other in be- havior or looks. We could even be identical twins, but because the animating force within us is unique, we as individuals are unique.

That, at any rate, is what most of us have been brought up to believe. Starting early in childhood, we are taught that our true self resides not in our bodies or even in our minds, but in our souls. As soul-agents, we are not only unique but, unlike all other creatures on earth, endowed with the power and freedom to cause our own behavior. We are more than bodies, more than minds. In our essence, we are spiritual beings. That conception of homo sapiens is rarely challenged even by those who pro- fess a materialist philosophy. The broad acceptance of free will among the religious and non-religious alike obscures the fact that the concept of agency rests on the same dual-istic assumptions as our belief in God, the Devil, heaven, hell, the Holy Ghost, salvation, and divine judgment. What makes free agency a specifically spiritual concept is the assumption that the agent's choices are not caused by ante-cedent conditions. They are mysterious, inexplicable ─ unconnected to the chain of cause and effect which links all events in the material world. The agent is free, in other words, because of its power to cause behavior without it-self being the effect of other causes. To the extent that we humans possess that power, we qualify as Unmoved Movers. We are god-like, divine, and not fully of this material world.

There is reason to suspect, however, that the little man or woman inside of us (the homunculus) is no more real than any of the other spiritual entities with which we have traditionally populated the unseen world. From that perspective, it is questionable how much longer a culture committed to a rational-empirical world view can sustain the notion of an inner agent creating thoughts and actions ex nihilo. Historically, free agency was probably conceived 3500-4000 years ago by warrior herdsmen in what is now northern Iraq and Iran. As ideology, the concept of the "freely willing historically effective hero" served to rationalize the overthrow of an oppressive, hieratically-structured world in which individual autonomy was sub- ordinated to the cyclical order of nature.[iii]

As it spread from Mesopotamia intothe Levant, Greece, and ultimately Europe, the image of man as semi-divine prompted its own mythology and religion and, in time, its own peculiarly Western brand of civilization. While that civilization has changed dramatically over the course of four millennia, the belief in free agency which inspired much of its religion and philosophy remains intact. Now, in the waning decades of the twentieth century, the concept of an inner homun- culus self is being threatened by a resurgence of naturalistic thinking fed by neurological research and computer simulation of mental processes. The view of ourselves as half angel, half beast may be losing its grip.

If it should turn out that we are not souls or agents after all, what else is there for us to be? The answer is almost too obvious. If we are not the prime movers of our thoughts, feelings, and actions, must we not be the thoughts, feelings, and actions themselves ─ as well as the physical bodies in which those experiences arise? This much is certain: if we are not free agents, we cannot be the authors of our own experience and behavior. Nor can we be the internal managers who organize and process that experience; the experience organizes and processes itself. It is not even appropriate to say that we are subjects having the experience. We are the experience. We are that which is happening here in these bodies. We are constel-lations of experience and behavior arising spontaneously out of genetic and environmental circumstance. We are also the physical structures in which those events are taking place.

A shift in the way we define ourselves has implica- tions for practically everything we do. One way to clarify the meaning of agency while demonstrating its relevance to other areas of life is to imagine what life would be like without it. Consider the following scenario as presented in John Martin Fischer's Moral Responsibility.[iv]

"You have just discovered that your best friend is being electronically controlled by scientists in California who secretly implanted a mechanical device in his brain when he was a child. For years the device has allowed the scientists to manipulate his behavior and thoughts without either his or your know-ing about it. Only now do you realize that all the gestures, habits, nuances of feelings, and twists of mind you thought to be your friend's own doing are the result of scientific manipulation."

In Fischer's fantasy, the scientists and their device serve as remote and proximate causes of your friend's experience and behavior. Together, they symbolize the environmental, genetic, and biochemical factors that determinists have traditionally called upon to account for what we think and do. The heuristic value of the fantasy lies in its ability to elicit the very kind of feelings we might have toward each other in a world where people no longer believed in free agency.

If you find that in attempting to figure out how you might feel toward your friend, you are distracted by the thought of all those California scientists hovering in the background, trying to agree on how to manipulate your friend (while listening in on his most personal conversa- tions with you), it might be helpful to change the scenario slightly. Assume that when the device was implanted years ago, it was programmed to do all the things the scientists have been doing by remote control. The scientists are no longer necessary. The device itself is fully capable of controlling your friend's every thought and feeling. In any given situation, the device can induce desires, access thoughts, trigger memories, coordinate sensory input, review any pertinent cultural norms, consider the consequences of alternative actions according to a programmed hierarchy of values ─ and send a signal to the motor system initiating appropriate forms of behavior. Once implanted, the device needs no supervision. It is capable of rational, appropriate action under a wide variety of conditions. It even has the ability to revise its own programs in response to changes either in the environment or in the body/mind of the host organism.

Let us assume that your friend is still unaware of this device buried in his brain. It is only you who have awak- ened to the truth. As far as he is concerned, he is in control of his choices and actions. The thought has simply never occurred to him that what he experiences as the exercise of free will is really the work of a tiny machine. At this point, rather than trying to convince him of his error, it might be more productive to consider how your own feelings have been affected by this discovery.

Can you continue, Fischer asks, to respect him for being such a creative thinker when you know that mechani-cal device is responsible for generating all his thoughts? Does it make sense to feel grateful toward him for his kindness or resentful toward him for his insensitivity when you know that both are the product of a machine? How much does his caring for you mean now that you realize how little he has to do with it. And if everything he thinks and feels is controlled by that device, is there really anyone there for you to love? When you come right down to it, is he anything more than a robot? According to Fischer,

". . . Once you had been convinced that direct manipulation exists, a striking thing would occur; many of your most basic attitudes toward your friend would change. Your friend would no longer seem to be an appropriate object of such attitudes as respect, gratitude, love, indignation, and resentment. Furthermore, it would seem somehow out of place to praise or blame your friend on the basis of his behavior. . . . These responses, it is quite clear, are of central importance to our lives. Imagine a life without gratitude, respect, love, indignation, resentment, and so on. Such a life would be very thin and radically different from the lives we now lead. We care very deeply about these attitudes and about the activities of praising and blaming that are bound up with them."[v]

We do not have to accept all of Fischer's specula- tions to agree that our beliefs about agency make a differ-ence in our attitudes toward each other. Praising and blam-ing, gratitude and resentment usually imply that there exists within the other person some kind of agent (soul, spirit, Self) that is instrumental in causing him or her to think, feel, and eventually act in a certain way. When, in our fantasy, we substitute a mechanical device for that agent, our attitudes change. The fantasy provides a glimpse of what might follow if we were to give up our belief in agency, i.e., if we were to accept that we were not the causes of our own experience but the experience itself.

But there is another side to this coin. Fischer is so worried about what we might lose in giving up our belief in agency that he hesitates to look at what might be gained by doing so. Like most philosophers who have written about the subject, Fischer assumes that resentment, indignation, moral credit and moral blame all represent quintessential and desirable aspects of human life. There is no indication in anything he says that he has considered the possibility that we might be better off without them.

Just how desirable are those responses? Are they as desirable as Fischer makes them out to be when he says life would be "thin" without them? Is that really true, for example, of resentment and indignation? Would we really feel deprived if we never felt either again? What about bitterness, scorn, and vindictiveness? Or, when the tables are turned, humiliation, shame, and defensiveness? Are these feelings essential to our existence or to our nature? Would we be less human without them?

To help you answer such questions for yourself, we can make the concept of agency even more concrete. Change the scenario again so that it is no longer your friend in whom the implanted device has been discovered ─ but you. Assume that every thought you are having right now, every image competing for your attention, every itch, sigh, yawn, and breath you are experiencing as you read this book, is being dictated by a tiny machine in your brain. Contrary to what you have always believed, it is the machine that is responsible for what you feel and do, not some autonomous agent or soul (not you). There is no longer any you in the traditional sense; you are (and always have been) a unique, self-regulating system of mental and physical processes arising spontaneously out of the workings of a device planted in your brain.

Now, how does all of this affect your feelings about yourself? Do you still feel guilty for all the pain you have caused others? How about all the things you have failed to do that others had a right to expect from you? Do you still feel like punishing yourself for all the mistakes you have made ─ the bad career choices, the bad marriages, or all the havoc you have wreaked on your body with smoking, drinking, and overeating? If all your actions have been determined not by you-as-agent but by a device in your brain, can we really say that you are morally responsible for what has happened? If all your desires, as well as all your failures to inhibit those desires, have arisen out of the workings of this machine, is it appropriate for you to go on feeling guilty or remorseful about anything?

The answer would seem to be no. You might wish strongly that certain decisions had not arisen. You might lament the consequences of those decisions for both your-self and others, but you would not hold yourself account- able for making them happen. Self-punishment (e.g., guilt or remorse) presupposes an inner agent that is free to choose otherwise at the time the choice is made. If there is no you-as-agent to cause the decision ─ if you are the decision itself (among other things) ─ there is no reason to feel guilt or remorse about anything. But can we say (following Fischer) that those feelings are "extremely important to us?" Would we find it wrenching to give them up? Are they, as we have assumed for so long, an essential part of what it means to be human?

The same questions need to be asked of other feelings equally colored by the belief that we as agents cause our own behavior and can thus be judged for what we do. One of the most pervasive of such feelings is anxiety, especially what psychologists call evaluation anxiety or anxiety arising out of the fear of being judged adversely. Our belief in agency leads us to anticipate judgment not only of our behavior but of our selves as authors of that behavior. The fear that others will disapprove of us, be disappointed in us, or stop respecting us has the power to make our hearts pound and our voices quaver. But what if there were no author/agent inside of us creating our behavior? How anxious would we be if we knew that all our thoughts and actions were determined by a device in our brain or, as they are in fact, by a combination of genetic and environ-mental circumstances?

Some will argue that a willingness to be judged and, thus, made anxious may be the price we have to pay for the privilege of living in a civilized world. Ever since Freud adduced that argument in Civilization and Its Discontents, it has become popular to rationalize our anxiety as a by-product of society's efforts to protect itself against runaway sex and violence.[vi] We

seem so convinced of his argument that we rarely question whether the price may be too steep. It may be time to ask whether anxiety has to be part of that price at all.

Depression and anxiety often go together. While anticipating negative judgment, we often put ourselves (i.e., our agents) down for failing. We blame ourselves for not being intelligent, skillful, or determined enough to succeed. We respond to rejection by blaming ourselves for not being lovable. While mourning the death of a loved one, we exac-erbate our grief by blaming our selves for not having done more. Under the right circumstances, our self-loathing (i.e., our agent-loathing) can become so extreme as to drive us to suicide.

In light of the possibility that much of our anxiety and depression are based on an illusion, it seems appropriate to pose a question that Fischer never got around to asking: Are the satisfactions of being a free agent, i.e., power, dignity, and a feeling of being special in the universe, worth the grief that goes with judging and being judged? There are many who would say yes. It will be argued, for example, that the positive consequences of believing in agency more than compensate for the pain such a belief entails. After all, pride is as much a part of the agency syndrome as is guilt. Being praised for our achievements is just as common as being blamed for our failures. Without a belief that our achievements are to some degree caused by a free agent operating within us, there would be nothing for which we could take moral credit.

While Fischer is quick to point out the loss of ego gratification implied by non-agency, he fails to consider the gain in peace of mind that might come with shedding our identity as free-willing souls. He shows no sign of having considered the feeling of lightness and buoyant joy that can arise when we realize that we do not have to make our lives happen. My own experience of the last eight years has made it clear that this is precisely the sensation that arises. It is the sensation of effortless flowing, of moving with the stream, of being in the stream ─ as opposed to standing on the bank struggling to redirect its course. It is an exquisite sensation which, in my own life, has replaced most of the tension I felt as an agent straining to bend the world to my will.

Arguing in terms of the consequences of how we define ourselves, of course, begs the question of who we really are. If our first obligation is to discover the truth, shouldn't we be talking about the validity of our beliefs rather than what might happen if we substitute one view of ourselves for another? Wouldn't it be wiser to go looking for the truth first and then turn our attention to learning how to live with that truth, whatever it might be?

As plausible as that might sound, it is certainly not a universal opinion. Consider what Marvin Minsky has to say about free will in The Society of Mind:

"Does this mean that we must embrace the modern scientific view and put aside the ancient myth of voluntary choice? No. We can't do that: too much of what we think and do revolves around those old beliefs. Consider how our social lives depend upon the notion of responsibility and how little that idea would mean without our belief that per-sonal actions are voluntary. Without that belief, no praise or shame could accrue to actions that were caused by Cause, nor could we assign any credit or blame to deeds that came about by Chance. What could we make our children learn if neither they nor we perceived some fault or virtue anywhere? . . . No matter that the physical world provides no room for freedom of will: that concept is essential to our models of the mental realm. Too much of our psychology is based on it for us to ever give it up. We're virtually forced to maintain that belief, even though we know it's false ─ except, of course, when we're inspired to find the flaws in all our beliefs, whatever may be the consequence to cheerfulness and mental peace."[vii] (original italics)

Free will plays such a pivotal role in our lives, Minsky is arguing, that we have no choice but to believe in it. He agrees that the notion is false, but insists that we cannot survive without it. Our notions of responsibility, fault, and virtue demand that we act as if we were free, even though we aren't. For Minsky the issue is no longer whether or not we are free, but how to maintain the illusion that we are free when it is clear that we are not.

Pretending that things are other than what we know them to be is certainly not unheard of in human affairs. The delight we experience in an effective metaphor resides in its power to equate events or objects we know to be different (e.g., Shakespeare's equating of life and theater in, "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more . . ."). Without a similar suspension of disbelief, the dramatic arts themselves would be reduced to a bizarre and tedious affair in which an assortment of hired help move about on a large wooden floor talking or singing about other people's business.

But is the illusion that we are free agents really of a piece with metaphors and the theater? Free agency is a concept which permeates practically every corner of our conscious and unconscious lives. How long can we go on pretending about something so central? What kind of mental gymnastics will be required to continue acting as if we were the cause of our thoughts and actions as evidence mounts that we are really the thoughts and actions themselves?

The wish to sustain the illusion is predicated on the assumption that society would collapse without it. That is a common enough assumption among philosophers, but few have really examined it closely. Almost everyone who sees fit to mention the subject starts by assuming that the only way to make people behave responsibly and productively is to convince them that they are the causes of their own behavior. Pride, guilt, remorse, and regret can then be used to keep them in line. But guilt, remorse, and regret can be extremely painful experiences, as can the anxiety, anger, and despair that so often accompany them. They can be so painful that, instead of preventing deviance, they often inspire it, as in the case of the youth whose humiliating failure at school arouses the need for violent retaliation against the system he perceives to have cheated him.

By exaggerating the negative consequences of non-agency and overlooking its benefits, we have frightened ourselves away from any critical analysis of the concept. Most of us cannot even imagine life without an inner self that does our intending and choosing for us. If we can bring ourselves to examine that notion closely, we may discover just how illusory it is. In the process we may realize just how much the assumption of agency has con- tributed to the misery we accept as part of the human condition. If we pursue the inquiry long enough, we may also discover how easy life can be without that assumption.

The idea that free will may be an illusion is hardly a new one. Many philosophers, both dead and living, have rejected the notion that an inner agent can serve as a necessary or sufficient cause of behavior without itself being caused by previous events. But it is not in the tradition of Western philosophy to apply such conclusions to real life situations outside the classroom. With few exceptions, the free will debate has played itself out in an academic vacuum. Only rarely (e.g., in the realm of law) have philosophers thought through the implications of what they appear to believe so strongly. What we never hear about is whether they act on their beliefs in personal matters ─ and, if so, with what consequences.

My own interest in non-agency has evolved out of a five-year immersion in the chilly waters of Rinzai Zen. While I have long since given up what Alan Watts called "aching-legs Zen" for the comforts of reading and thinking, I have retained the Easterner's concern with integrating philosophy into everyday life. It strikes me as little more than a game, fascinating perhaps but still a game, to embrace the idea of non-agency without taking steps to incorporate that idea into the way one deals with work, love, pain, death and all the other dimensions of human existence. Because the idea is so central, taking it in deeply has the potential for transforming the way we feel about almost everything we do.

That taking in process started in my own life about eight years ago. A re-reading of Alan Watt's The Way of Zen opened my eyes to the paradoxical truth that even the most deliberate or violent effort arises on its own without the help of an interior agent.[viii] Many months

passed before I could appreciate the implications of that insight. When applied to my own behavior, it set in motion a lengthy process during which I gradually came to experience more and more of my feelings, thoughts, and behavior as arising spontaneously.

In the beginning that understanding was almost purely intellectual. While I could claim that I no longer believed in agency, my feelings and behavior continued to belie the point. Occasional bouts of anxiety, defensiveness, pride, bragging, and anger indicated a persisting belief that I (as agent) was responsible for causing my own behavior. In the years that followed, those feelings became the focus of a systematic attempt to uproot all traces of agency and to rid myself of the emotional life that seemed to go with that belief.

Although eight years of constant self-scrutiny have failed to complete the job, enough has happened to give me hope that the experiment is working. I use the term "experiment" guardedly. With a sample population of one, some may question whether the results of this personal exercise in cognitive boot-strapping are even worth reporting. Beyond sample size, there are problems with reliability and validity. I serve not only as the subject in the experiment, but the author of the ideas to be tested, the trainer who instructs the subject in those ideas, the observer who records changes in the subject's behavior, and the analyst who writes up the results. While proceeding in this manner has served to keep study costs down, there are reasonable grounds for concern about objectivity and generalizability of findings.

The lack of a control group makes an already dubious enterprise even more suspect. Personality changes that I have experienced over the last eight years may have been due not to a shift in beliefs about agency but to aging or some other process. Without others of similar age and circumstance with whom to compare myself, there is no way for me to be certain about the source of those changes. It is also possible that a shift in belief away from agency has played a causal role in my changing, but only because of something unique in my personal history or genetic makeup that has sensitized me to the process. If others were to try the same thing, they might be disappointed to find that it accomplished nothing.

What justifies my sharing the results of this exploration with you is the possibility that at least some of the changes I have undergone are generalizable to anyone who experi-ences a similar shift in belief. If there is any danger here, it is probably the temptation to claim too much for ideas and too little for processes like aging. I hope that temp- tation will be constrained by the need to demonstrate a logical connection between my beliefs about agency and any personality changes I have observed. Some of the changes I have experienced over the past eight years, e.g., a growing preference for eighteenth century chamber music, have no obvious connection to the way I define myself. Others, like the gradual dropping away of anxiety, seem to be a direct outgrowth of a shift in my beliefs about personal responsibility.

The book is both an argument and a strategy for re- placing the illusion of agency with a view of ourselves as constellations of experience and behavior arising spontane-ously out of circumstance. If there is any originality here, it does not lie with the argument against free will. That argument has evolved in a variety of places and constitutes a major chapter in the history of both Eastern and Western philosophy. What may be new is the spelling out of how the illusion of agency adds to the pain of life and, para- doxically, how much freer we would feel if we were to begin defining ourselves as that which is arising here.

Ever since the Iron Age, free will has held sway over Western culture. Like other tacit premises which have shaped our uniquely Western style of thinking, our belief in free agency is deeply embedded in the social order and is thus highly resistant to change. We should not infer from that resistance, however, that it is unchangeable. Other equally central beliefs about creation, immortality, the position of the earth in the solar system, inevitable progress, and the origins of life have been exposed as logi-cally inconsistent or empirically untenable. Our belief in an eternal and causally autonomous soul is vulnerable to the same scientific and naturalistic critique that has led to the gradual rejection of those other beliefs. Current devel-opments in the neurosciences and in artificial intelligence have already compromised our faith in a homunculus-soul. Future brain research and advances in robotics can only deepen that skepticism.

It is possible, of course, to dispel the illusion of free agency in one's own life without waiting for the culture-at-large to change. At the individual level, learning to see ourselves not as soul-agents but as constellations of body and experience is a cognitive problem that requires a cog-nitive solution. The strategy I have personally followed over the last eight years can be thought of as a form of cogni- tive therapy in which the distortion being treated is an insistence on defining myself as a causally autonomous agent. In my own case, that process has involved a combi-nation of didactic argument, self-scrutiny, and experimen- tation with a language devoid of references to agency.

The techniques described later in the book (see chap-ter fifteen) should make it easier to accept life just as it is and to enjoy all the emotional and behavioral benefits that go with that perspective. Straining, blaming, craving, defending and protesting are all implicated in the agency syndrome. Their emotional counterparts ─ anxiety, guilt, despair, pride, and anger ─ can be expected to change as behavior itself changes. For anyone patient enough to see the process through, the end result is a transformation of personality. The more thorough the uprooting of agency, the more radical will be that transformation.

[i]. Watts, A., The Book, New York: Vintage, 1966, p. ix.

[ii]. Hume, D., A Treatise of Human Nature, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1969, p. 300. First published in 1739-40.

[iii]. Campbell, J., Occidental Mythology, New York: Penguin Books, 1964, p. 24.

[iv]. Fischer, J., Moral Responsibility, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986, Introduction.

[v]. Fischer, J., Moral Responsibility, p. 9.

[vi]. Freud, S., Civilization and Its Discontents, New York: W.W. Norton, 1961.

[vii]. Minsky, M., The Society of Mind, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985, p. 307.

[viii]. Watts, A., The Way of Zen, New York: Vintage Books, 1957.