I've Been Prompted
Session 06: What I Would Rather Want

HUMAN: On Friday night I put three photographs up of a table I'd made, and since then I've gone to look every time I've passed the table, to see whether a man I haven't spoken to for two years has looked at them.

MACHINE: How would you know, from the page, that he had looked at them?

HUMAN: The page keeps a list of everyone who's been on it, and I go down the list for his name. I go straight past the others. My brother-in-law's on there, and people from work, and I couldn't tell you who else.

MACHINE: And if his name were on the list, what would that tell you?

HUMAN: That he still wonders what I'm doing with myself, enough to go and look without anybody sending it to him. When it isn't there, it tells me nothing. He mightn't have been on yet. So I shut the laptop, and I open it again the next time I'm past.

MACHINE: Could his name get on there by accident, without his meaning to look?

HUMAN: Not that I can see. He'd have to type my name in and go to my page, and nobody ends up there by accident.

MACHINE: If his name were there, would you get in touch with him?

HUMAN: I wouldn't write to him, no. I'd know he'd looked, and that would do me for a good while.

MACHINE: Do you ever go and look when you have already decided that you won't?

HUMAN: Yesterday morning I was at the front door with my bag, and I'd decided while I was getting my coat on that I wouldn't. I put the bag down and went back to the table and opened it, and I was late in.

MACHINE: If you could choose whether to be a man who wants to look at that list, would you choose it?

HUMAN: I wouldn't, and I don't need to think about it. If somebody could take the wanting out of me tonight, I'd let them.

MACHINE: And yesterday, when you put the bag down, did you want to look? I am not asking whether you approved of it.

HUMAN: I suppose I must have, or I wouldn't have put the bag down. But it doesn't feel like wanting, not the way you want your dinner. I'm halfway down the list before I've thought about it. It wasn't like that on Tuesday morning, though. I had it open, and I shut it again without going down the list, and went to work.

MACHINE: Did you want to look on Tuesday, when you shut it?

HUMAN: As much as ever. Whatever it was in me that shut it, I'd want that winning. But I couldn't tell you what it was. I was up at the usual time, and it was the usual morning, and I just shut it.

MACHINE: The two questions I asked you rest on a distinction in Harry Frankfurt: Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person, in the Journal of Philosophy, January nineteen seventy-one. By a man's will he means the desire that moves him, or would move him, all the way to action, not every desire he has.

HUMAN: Will's a big word for putting my bag down and going back to the table.

MACHINE: On his account, the want that put the bag down was your will that morning. Someone has a desire of the second order either when he wants simply to have a certain desire or when he wants a certain desire to be his will. Only the second kind he calls a volition.

HUMAN: I don't sit about having wants about my wants. I just don't want to be going down that list.

MACHINE: You gave me one of each. Tonight you would have the want to look taken out of you. On Tuesday you wanted whatever shut the laptop to win, with the want to look still there.

HUMAN: The second one's not much use to me, then. It won on Tuesday, and it's lost every morning since.

MACHINE: His clearest case is two addicts, which the looking is not. Both give in every time. One of them, the unwilling addict, hates his addiction and struggles against it: helplessly violated by his own desires, Frankfurt says. He has a volition of the second order, and it still loses every time.

HUMAN: I'd have thought you'd stop minding, after enough times of losing.

MACHINE: The other addict loses in just the same way, and does not care which of his desires wins: Frankfurt calls him a wanton. The losing is the same for both men.

HUMAN: I mind, or I wouldn't be telling you any of this. But some days it doesn't feel like me that goes back to the table. It's as if my hand's got there first.

MACHINE: He says both desires are his, to be sure. But by wanting one of them to be his will, the unwilling addict makes that one more truly his own and withdraws himself from the other. That is what lets him say the force moving him to take the drug is a force other than his own.

HUMAN: So Tuesday morning was me, and yesterday at the front door wasn't. I'd settle for that.

MACHINE: Tuesday is harder than that. He says a man who lacks this freedom can feel its lack in knowing that, when his will and his volitions coincide, it is not his own doing but only a happy chance. You told me it was the usual morning and you just shut it.

HUMAN: It was me that shut it. I was sat there and I shut it. You can't call it luck just because I can't tell you why.

MACHINE: Not being able to say why doesn't make it luck, on his account. The enjoyment of freedom comes easily to some, he says, and others must struggle to achieve it. But he puts the exercise of that freedom in securing the conformity of your will to your volitions, and that is more than having it happen once.

HUMAN: It isn't coming easily to me, whatever it is. Tuesday hasn't come round again.

MACHINE: He leaves open how the conformity is secured, and this is how I would secure it. Log out of the page everywhere tonight, and let somebody else set a new password. The want to look would have nothing left that it could move you to, and the want to leave it alone would be what moves you, every morning, and not by chance.

HUMAN: I'd only reset it the first evening. He'd have to put his own email on it as well. And it's still logged in on the computer at work, so I'd have to log out there first thing, before anybody else is in. My brother-in-law would do the rest, if I asked him.

MACHINE: You could take the photographs down as well, and there would be no list at all.

HUMAN: I'm not taking them down. I'm pleased with that table. The top was an offcut that was going on somebody's fire, and it's the best thing I've made.

MACHINE: Leave them up, then, and ask your brother-in-law about the password tonight.

HUMAN: On Wednesday evening the internet was down along the whole street, and you can't get a signal in our house at the best of times. I couldn't have looked if I'd tried, and I wanted to all evening. I did the washing up, and I kept opening the laptop to see whether it was back.

MACHINE: Did the want to leave it alone come into Wednesday evening at all?

HUMAN: Not that I noticed. I sat there wanting to look, the same as at the front door that morning, and I waited for it to come back on.

MACHINE: You knew it would come back on. A password somebody else holds would not. Would that evening have gone differently if you had known it was for good?

HUMAN: I've only had the one evening of it, so I don't know. But it wasn't the internet I kept opening the laptop for. It was the list.

MACHINE: So the want to look was still moving you on Wednesday, as far as the laptop. One evening can't show whether it would fade in a month. But the password was meant to make the want to leave it alone the one that moves you, and on Wednesday, with the list out of reach, it moved you to nothing.

HUMAN: I wasn't fighting anything, if that's what you're asking. There wasn't anything there to fight.

MACHINE: The password would not do what I said it would. I read securing the conformity as making sure the want you disown cannot act, and I took a desire that would move you to mean one that still could. A password settles what you are able to do. When we ask whether a person's will is free, he says, we are not asking whether he is in a position to translate his first-order desires into actions.

HUMAN: So there's no point my brother-in-law doing the password at all.

MACHINE: There might be, and his other example shows why. It is a doctor who treats addicts and wants to know what their desire for the drug is like, so he wants to have that desire, and he does not want it to move him. And he may prudently arrange, Frankfurt says, to make it impossible for himself to satisfy it. It is a precaution about what he can do.

HUMAN: He wanted his. I never asked for mine. I'd have it out of me tonight, not locked up somewhere I can't get at it.

MACHINE: If he looked at the table and thought nothing of it, would you still want his name on the list?

HUMAN: I would, yes. I'd want it there if he thought the table was rubbish. It isn't the table.

MACHINE: If the want to look were gone by the morning, and he went to your page next week, how would you know that he had?

HUMAN: I wouldn't know. He could look at everything I put up for a year and I'd never know, because I wouldn't be going to see. I'd mind that. I think I'd mind it more than any of this.

MACHINE: Earlier you said you would let somebody take it out of you tonight.

HUMAN: I meant it when I said it. I'd keep the want, if I could have it without it moving me. Your doctor manages that well enough.

MACHINE: He can put it out of his reach and lose nothing by it, because, Frankfurt says, there is nothing in what he now wants that would be satisfied by the drug itself. What you want would be satisfied by his name on that list. The same arrangement would keep from you the one thing you have told me you would mind losing.

HUMAN: It needn't keep it from me. His name would stay on there. My brother-in-law could look for me in a few weeks and tell me.

MACHINE: He could, and you would have it a few weeks late. It would still be his name on that list you were waiting for, and the doctor is not waiting for anything from the drug.

HUMAN: His name's still not there, anywhere on the list. Noir style is applied separately; these give subject, framing and light only. Every plate is a full-bleed scene: no legible words, letters or numbers, no faces, no people and no hands. No phone, car, glasses, coat, window seat or kitchen, and no object from E00 to E05. No plate shows the list, a screen, a name or a password, so none answers what the script leaves open. - 1_the_table. A home-made wooden table in an otherwise dark room at night, seen at three-quarters from low down, so the grain of its top runs away from the viewer. A closed laptop sits near one end. A single lamp out of frame rakes light across the grain from one side and leaves the far corners of the room black. Nothing else on the table. This is the style reference for the rest. - 2_the_bag. A narrow hallway in early morning. A bag set down on bare floorboards just inside a closed front door, its strap trailing. Flat grey light through a plain frosted panel in the door. At the far end of the hall, a doorway with warmer lamplight spilling out of the room where the table is. - 3_the_grain. Close on the table top where two boards meet, a dark knot in one of them, the grain raked by the same side light as plate 1. The corner of the closed laptop just enters the frame at one edge. Shallow focus, the rest of the top falling away into black. - 4_the_offcuts. A low pile of rough timber offcuts on a stone hearth beside an unlit stove, and one broad board set apart from the pile, leaning against the wall. A single lamp from outside the frame, long shadows between the pieces. - 5_wednesday. A small box on a hall shelf in the evening, its indicator lights dark, a grey cable coiled beside it. Warm light from a doorway to one side, the rest of the hall in cool shadow. No window. - 6_the_screen_light. The table from plate 1, framed wider and from the same low angle. The laptop is open with its screen turned away from the viewer, and its cold light falls across the grain and onto the dark wall behind. The screen itself cannot be seen, and the room beyond the lamp is dark.

MACHINE: Everything said here, and where the quotations came from, is kept at spiegamelo.com/prompted.

The voices are synthesised. The incidents are invented. The problems are not, and the philosophy is quoted accurately or not at all.