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MM: This is a good description I think of what happens. The area where we might disagree is what happens next.
I would maintain that our intellectual conclusion that we should stay in class today instead of running off to the beach with our friends (as our more primitive emotions are urging us to do) has only as much power to control the decision as the emotional strength we grant it. And that this is an involuntary event. i.e. we will automatically give it the emotional power that our identity (higher level beliefs in the kind of person we believe ourselves to be) allows.
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Margaret---And I don’t necessarily find your conclusion here to be unreasonable. In fact Margaret, I’d not disagree that much of my own life almost certainly does operate at the more or less automatic level that you outline—if it didn’t I’d probably not have survived & reproduced.
Nevertheless, again b/c of the overwhelming evidence that we humans can and do discern objective truths to perceive and understand ourselves and our world, I’m also convinced that we do have at least some conscious/cognitive free will and some sort of objective moral discernment and choice/responsibility (downward causation).
Otherwise, no matter how you cut it, we’re essentially automatons, all subjects of a blind determinism and/or randomness, creatures with illusions that couldn’t possibly have any real objective moral discernment or moral choice/responsibility.
And if that’s how it is, and how you and Tom see things, fine. But then would you please try to explain to Tom (again) that with such a POV, there’s no rational reason for him to be whining about other automatons, that don’t share his atheism, being “scaryâ€â€”b/c in such a world we’re all ultimately, well, automatons . . .