If Spinoza reckons that the good life is one where we can be motivated increasingly by internal causation rather than external causes (thus changing what we think of as free will), can we postulate a theory of mind that is simply a collection of such causations?

 The experience of free will is the experience that my mind wills a thing to be for me, and to some extent I accomplish it, through physical and mental agency. What is open to me are my interior causations, consistent with the boundaries of mind, and my ability to work in the physical world to the extent of my abilities and the laws of the empirical universe. (I make the physical/mental distinction solely for convenience. I really think that mind is material, too) What I think I am, do, and can be, is circumscribed by these properties of internal cause. There is no aspect of my experience of free will that is not served by internal causes: it is the case that the variety of possibilities presented to my will are identical with those present in the world and in mind.

If it is in our nature to seek an increased participation in internal causation, who is doing the participating? There is a homonculus problem here. Nonetheless, the events that happen internally depend not so much on who is in at the meeting but on what is on the agenda. Free will is all that is the case. It doesn’t matter so much how the causations are passed ‘under review’ (it is difficult to escape the homoncular metaphor of language); instead, the source of free will’s predicates is identical with internal causation. This doesn’t limit our mind, because it is our mind.

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