The Problems With Remote Control Willings

In O’Shaughnessy’s book The Will, he brings up several cases (α-ε) of possible scenarios where remote-control willings occur. These cases are each set up to be as close to actual occurrences of willings as possible. However, O’Shaughnessy discovers difficulties with these not being as close to an actual willing as initially assumed along the way, and he is forced to progressively modify the examples to make up for the missing criteria of an actual willing. In the beginning of chapter four however, he points out three ways in which all of his cases of remote control willing have gone wrong (with the exception of later cases ζ and η which have their own different problems).
The first difficulty O’Shaughnessy finds with his cases of remote control has to do with the use of the term “know” in relation to physical action in contrast with the use of the term “know” in relation to remote control willings.
First, it is necessary to explain the way in which we arrive at “knowing” being an issue in these cases: In generating the remote control examples of possible extra-bodily willings, it became apparent that one of the necessary conditions of a successful “willing” was the way in which one “just knows” that one’s limbs are going to move, when one has a desire to move them. If this knowledge were not direct, and immediate, we would question whether or not a given act was a willing.
For example, if one did not “just know” that a dollar was going to move across the room when one willed it to, (One knew it was going to move because one’s friend in the next room was going to yank on an invisible string on giving an agreed upon signal); we could hardly say that one willed the dollar bill to move. It seems, one must have a “just knowing” or immediate knowledge that things will move, like when one moves one’s limbs for it to count as a willing. Therefore, if we want the cases of remote control willing to be genuine, the subject must “just know” that the object under his control is about to move.
However, O’Shaughnessy points out that there is a problem in our usage of the term “know” here, in that the way we are trying to apply it to an extra-bodily willing (say, willing a Dr. Pepper bottle to tip over, and “just knowing” that it will respond upon one’s remote thought of it’s doing so) does not (and cannot) match up with the common usage (eg. willing one’s foot to kick a Dr. Pepper bottle, and just knowing that one’s foot will respond upon one’s willing it so). The difference is this: with the first use it can be further explained (beyond one’s present knowledge) why one has come to “just know” this, the other use has no such explanation about it and by necessity it delves into a realm of magic.
For the first use: when one says “I ‘just know’ my foot is going to move to connect with the Dr Pepper bottle”, there is a way in which one’s knowledge could be explained with a further story about the foot being attached to one’s leg/nerves/brain etc. and there is a certain scientific chemical/bodily story that can go on to explain the correlation between one’s desiring one’s foot to move and its moving. So while one “just knows” one’s foot will move, and the further scientific explanation is by no necessity apparent to one, it IS indeed possible to explain why one can have this immediate knowledge.
For the second use: When one says “I ‘just know’ the Dr. Pepper can is going to tip over merely by my willing it to do so,” there can be no such story. If one were to somehow “just know” the Dr. Pepper bottle will tip, there is no apparent way in which one could further explain or ground this knowledge. There is no scientific story that can go on connecting one to the “remotely controlled” Dr. Pepper bottle, for by hypothesis, one controlled it remotely (there is no mechanism involved). It is mysterious, and magical how one could have such knowledge. This is why O’Shaughnessy says that “the uses of ‘know’ could not be made to tally with those operative in cases of physical action.” The “just knowing” in remote control cases has no plausible explainableness.
The second difficulty in O’Shaughnessy’s cases of remote control is a little less clearly discussed. However, it has something to do with the fact that his remote control cases need a separate internal event to go on, while a case of normal willing does not. The problem is, in an important way, the remote control willings are not as identical to normal willings as we wanted them to be.
In the case of a normal willing, (eg. wiggling one’s pinky finger) one does so effortlessly. There is no separate act of trying to move the pinky finger that must go on. The act of willing one’s pinky finger to wiggle is effortless, and spontaneous. You can (like Nike’s slogan says) just do it! You can do it simply, and without any real separate internal act of effort. The link between the intention to wiggle one’s pinky finger, and one’s pinky wiggling is effortless (and not much else is contained in the story of one’s willing it to wiggle).
However, in all of the cases of remote control, no matter how they were formulated, there must be a separate “focusing” or “trying” to move (say again, the Dr. Pepper bottle). One, as O’Shaughnessy imagines it, must say “Move!” to the Dr. Pepper bottle first, or in some other way command it...under one’s breath, or mentalistic command, or etc. Because one seems to have to “engage” the object into one’s sphere of willing, a separate internal event of trying to move the bottle (that is separate from the actual willing it to move) must go on in all of the remote control examples. You cannot in other words, just do it. Otherwise it would seem, things would just pop in and out of our ability to will them helter-skelter. Say, whenever one were within three feet of some force-field of willing-power that surrounded one. One would just as easily move a stapler in one’s proximity as if it had always been amongst one’s limbs. But this is hardly the cases of remote control O’Shaughnessy has in mind. One could not seemingly have any say over what objects one could will and what objects one could not. Therefore, it is distinctly different from normal willing in this way. Hence, O’Shaughnessy says, “that the putatively willed extra-bodily physical phenomenon needed to be triggered off by a distinct internal act.”
The third difficulty, and the least elaborated on (at least up until the point of the beginning of chapter 4) is that of one’s ability to feel the objects in cases of remote control.
To arrive at this difficulty, we must first imagine what it would be like to move an ordinary limb without any feeling. It is in fact, almost impossible to imagine it coherently. If one was completely numb in one side of one’s face (say, one’s dentist went a little over-board on the anesthetic or, if that is not sufficient, by some other imaginative means where all possible ways of feeling or sensation within one’s right side of the face were “switched off”) it would be almost laughable to think that one could move that side of one’s face. So it seems, that one of the necessary conditionals of normal cases of willing is that one must have some awareness of feeling in the object one wishes to will some sort of movement in.
O’Shaughnessy says that this is not a strictly epistemological connection (it is not simply about knowledge of where one’s limbs are). For instance, to go back to our example with the anesthetized face, one could hold up a mirror and learn exactly where all the parts of their face are (drooping as they may be), but with this knowledge, still be unable to move said parts. It is instead, he argues something closely connected to our power to move those limbs that they be “immediately present to us”. In other words, it is part of a relation of power that we have feeling in things we can move with our will.
Now, applied to the cases of remote willing, it seems really odd to think that one can truly feel the Dr. Pepper bottle, as one can one’s toes or face. It is even hard to imagine what it would be like to have feeling in the Dr. Pepper bottle–a sort of plasticy shapely feeling I guess. In any case, when one is remotely moving an object around there is something distinctly “absent of feeling” about the “remoteness” of the movement (hence the use of the word “remote control”). Just as there was no real way to explain the knowledge one comes to, that the Dr. Pepper bottle is going to move, there is no real way to explain one’s feeling in the Dr. Pepper bottle either. What on earth could it be that allows you to do so? The fact is, O’Shaughnessy points out, that whenever one wants to will extra-bodily movement, they tend to blindly ignore this part of what makes up a normal willing.
So again, it comes down to remote-control willings not being as the same as normative cases of willings as we initially intended when the cases were brought up.