I just finalized an insight about something I’ve been thinking about on&off concerning the “will” after reading an article somewhere on it.  I was sitting on the toilet (where Martin Luther, I once read, believed he had his best thoughts—I feel I do good reasoning there but don’t think I’ve worked out any poems there).

Here’s my insight: that among the lesser awarenesses a person’s verbal awareness contain are an interior speech area and a speech-communication area.  The first provides the person with his internal monologue, which uses most of speech mechanisms, with the speech mechanisms that allow others to hear us being inhibited when we’re “thinking.”

Sudden minor thought: that a gadget that could listen to our sublingual (if that’s what I’m talking about) utterances, could read our minds.

The second area contains those final speech mechanisms and—I suppose—some sort of speech-management center that turns them on or off as appropriate.  The second area vocalizes a person’s interior speech, which continues just as it would when only heard by the person.

My insight is merely that interior speech is the means a person uses to record in communicable detail, although far from completely, his life.  It has nothing to do with willing us to carry out some action or reaction, but merely records that the latter has occurred.  What it does precisely is add words to our memories of experiences of ours so that we can immediately or  later describe them to others, or ourselves.

Confusingly, or so it seems to me, some people mistake their interior speech area with their willing selves, when actually other parts of the brain determine what we do. That we should not call the result “free will” because the interior speech area is not involved, as the person or persons writing the article that began these thoughts of mine seems absurd to me.  I consider my “self” to be my entire body, so any part of it that makes me do something is Me exercising a sort of free will—which I define as doing something mainly because of what one is rather than because of some external force—although obeying natural laws.

Since “I” did not determine what I am, this free will is, of course, only relatively free; it’s just the “I” that has been forced on me acting in accordance with what it is in response to something in the environment acting in accordance with what it is.

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