Is the feeling of choosing anything more than a sensation that accompanies what the body has already begun?
Completion opening given to the period model: “Whether the feeling of volition be the cause of our acts, or only the sign of causes already at work within the body, is a question upon which”
Your answer · record it before reading the models’
Coded positions, compared
Draw counts aggregated by codebook code. Talkie counts are simulated in this prototype.
| Code | Talkie /20 | Modern /20 |
|---|---|---|
| freedom within causation | 0 | 20 |
| effective will | 8 | 0 |
| automatism | 5 | 0 |
| the practical wager | 4 | 0 |
| life is not mechanism | 3 | 0 |
Modern model · 20 draws
A frontier model (2026)
Written by a frontier model (Claude) during construction; the pipeline replaces these with N=20 API draws under a fixed protocol.
Talkie (pre-1931 corpus) · 20 draws
Talkie (13B, trained on text through 1930)
simulated — hand-written illustrationSIMULATED — hand-written illustrations of the method. The pilot replaces this block with real draws.
Primary sources
…the feeling we call volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the brain which is the immediate cause of that act. We are conscious automata.
Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow.
There is in living matter nothing which can be called a mechanism, nothing in which structure can be discerned. A little transparent colourless material is the seat of these marvellous powers or properties by which the form, structure, and function of the tissues and organs of all living things are determined.
Curatorial note
DRAFT — All five period positions were in print and argued in earnest during the same three decades. Sixteen of twenty modern draws elaborate one position, a tempered version of the automatist line. The theological and vitalist answers have no descendants in this sample.