What Is Our Doing?

If you are like most people, you can hold up your fist and extend your index finger.

You can repeat that.

But you cannot move a chess piece across the board in the same way, merely by willing it to move.

You can, however, use movements of your hand to move it where you want it.

You can do that even when the move is not permitted by the rules of chess.

You can also use your other hand to extend the index finger from the example above.

This is not unheard of. Maybe it is very cold and the finger no longer moves as you want. Maybe you have a cramp.

A sword is somewhere between the finger and the chess piece.

You can learn to use it as an extension of your body and, to a certain extent, feel what happens at its other end through your hand, even with your eyes closed.

But when you put it down, that connection is gone.

You can begin a calculation when you need the result. The answer is not something you can will into place either.

You are constrained by a formal system that works by its own rules.

If you are unsure, you can calculate again, maybe in a different but equivalent way.

You can choose to begin and how carefully to proceed, but you do not simply choose the result.

Now imagine a ball rolling towards a precious vase.

If nothing intervenes, it will knock the vase over and break it.

You can intercept the ball.

Then you have saved the vase from destruction.

But suppose you do not move.

Have you failed to save it?

That may depend on whether you saw the ball, whether you could reach it, whether other persons could have saved it, what else would have happened, and why exactly you did not move.

The examples do not leave us with one obvious place where our doing begins.

Moving a finger seems straightforward enough. A chess piece moves through movements of your body, and training can make a sword part of that movement. You can begin a calculation without choosing its result. You may save the vase by intervening, or fail to save it without moving at all.

What makes all of this our doing?

Does our doing begin where we choose something?