Will

Three words define it and everything else in the entry is a claim about where it operates. That which chooses is deliberately minimal, making will a function rather than a faculty of persons, which is what allows it to appear at the level of a quantum interaction and at the level of a life. The quantum will controls quantum interactions, and it may be sublated to the emotional self, which includes external wills, or to the conscious, so the same will is what a particle has and what a person exercises, and the difference is which controller it has been given over to. Two extensions matter. Will is not confined to the living, since a will must be exercised to bind a macroscopic object together and need not be under conscious or emotional control, which is what makes an object an animus. And will produces time, since the attraction between a cluster of interactions creating an object is the act of will, will is the attraction between two interactions, gravity may be the effect of a will to order and time the effect of a will to entropy. Sublation is what happens to a will that is taken, and it is the operation most of the framework's account of power runs on, since the emotional self includes external wills and a sublated person's choices are being made by somebody else. Volition is the process by which the conscious will initiates or intercepts action, and free will has a book of its own in the series.

Free will is among the most argued questions in philosophy, with compatibilists holding that freedom is consistent with determinism and libertarians requiring genuine alternatives. Schopenhauer made will the blind ground of everything, which is the nearest historical parallel to Marsh's extension beyond persons. Neuroscience since Libet has studied the timing of conscious intention. Physics has no place for choice in the resolution of quantum indeterminacy, and most interpretations treat it as either irreducibly probabilistic or as merely apparent. Marsh's position requires the strongest reading available, since making will the chooser behind every interaction places agency at the foundation of physics rather than as an emergent property of complex systems.