Can’t Free Will and Determinism Just Get Along?
I have learned a lot in my long day of having a blog. Things have changed rapidly. I switched from WordPress.com to Blogger at one point. Later, I decided to abandon Blogger because the interface sucks and host it on my own site using WordPress. I’ve gotten five visitors and one comment. It’s been a wild ride, that’s for sure.
One of the things I learned was ‘link to a lot of other people’s blogs.’ In my first blog post, you may notice that I was goofing around and putting links to everyone and their mother just for the fun of it. That strategy really paid off, and got me my first commenting visitor! I went and checked out his blog and, as it turns out, it’s actually somewhat interesting. It’s still a blog and has things like his perspective class list sitting in there for no reason among the more interesting things, but it’s not bad for being a blog and I added it to my links section. Thus the other thing I learned was ‘blogs can be somewhat interesting.’ This particular person posts a lot of stuff on the free will vs. determinism debate. Specifically he has a lot of stuff from the biological realm. Just check it all out for yourself here.
Maybe everything has a cause and maybe it doesn’t. It certainly seems like everything has a cause when we just look at the world using our ‘common sense.’ However, we know very well by now that common sense is often wrong. There are good arguments on both sides as to whether everything in the universe has a cause or not. We, as humans, can’t imagine an uncaused event. It is beyond our capabilities to imagine something happening that was not caused by something else. However, we know for sure that at least some things are true of which humans cannot conceive. For example, time either had a beginning or it did not. Humans can neither conceive of infinity or of time having a beginning or end. Yet, one of those things has to be true, right?
The big question that I’m leading to here, though, is how this affects free will. What I would like to put out there is simply this: The answer to the question as to whether everything is caused has absolutely nothing to do with the free will question. That’s right. They are not related in the slightest. It doesn’t matter if every single part of your brain as well as every piece of energy that will ever drive it is completely caused and predictable if we just knew how to do the calculations, it would not matter.
We have free will.
That’s the thing too many people forget. We have free will. That isn’t really something that can be debated. We have invented this problem of whether free will exists where no problem actually is. It has arisen because we humans keep looking into the past at past choices and thinking about ‘what if’ we had done something differently. Then we wonder if it was even possible to have done something differently. Since we can’t go into the past to test whether it’s possible, there’s no way of knowing with certainty, right? Even if we do go back in time, we have to have the exact same conditions present as the first time, so we can’t remember that we’re conducting the experiment. Since we don’t know that we’re conducting the experiment, we might choose the same choice again (in fact are likely to since we chose it the first time) and so there is just no way to know if we ever really have the ability to make our own choices. Well, my friends, we have just unwittingly invented the free-will vs. determinism debate.
What was the one thing that we forgot while we got muddled down in thought about the past here? We forgot the simple fact that we have free will. We both know that we can make our own decisions and that when we make those decisions it is actually us deciding.
Think I’m oversimplifying things? Well, I’ll prove right now that you have free will. We don’t even need to go into the past. We’ll do it right now. Put something in front of you. It can be anything but should be something that is light enough to pick up. Set it down in front of you right now. Don’t do anything yet, but I want you to decide whether or not you are going to pick that object up when I say ‘go.’ Think really hard about this decision. Make sure it’s firm in your mind. I want you to decide right here in now what is going to happen when I say ‘go.’ You will either pick the object up or not. Whatever you decided, make it happen when the time comes. Have you decided? Are you ready?
GO!
As long as you did that in earnest, I guarantee that you did what you had previously decided to do. There. You have free will. It really is that simple. If the exact same state of the universe occurred again, would you pick it up that time? Who knows? Who cares? The fact is that this thing that exists in the world that you call ‘me’ decided on which action to take and took that action. That’s free will.
A lot of the difficulty is that people insist on coming at the problem backwards. It’s like hitting your hand with a hammer and then trying to figure out if your hand hurts by studying the speed at which the hammer came down, the weight of the hammerhead, etc. You know damn well your hand hurts! And you know damn well that you have free will.
The real question then is not if we have free will. It’s a question of how we can have free will, especially if determinism is true. This is a fairly complex explanation and I actually wrote my whole thesis on this area back in college, but I’ll touch on it briefly below.
Free will exists in a different context than determinism. Not to delve too far into Descartes here, but he famously wrote the phrase ‘cogito ergo sum.’ Often translated as “I think therefore I am,” what he was actually saying here is that he can know that he exists because he is the one doing the wondering about whether he exists. Whatever it is wondering about whether it exists, Descartes calls “I.” It is not a big leap from there to go on and prove that at least one thing that is not me exists. I experience input from things that I do not recognize as being myself, and I call those things “not I” (or simply “other stuff”). Proving that anything besides those two things exist, however, is pretty hard and so Descartes resorts to some religious stuff that we’ll not get into. The point is, there is a distinction you can easily draw between you and other stuff. The other stuff may be only one thing or it may be billions of things, but it is not you.
This is important here because these two things are really just separate contexts. You can never talk about something out of its context or it doesn’t make sense. Free will belongs to the context of YOU. Determinism belongs to the context of OTHER STUFF. This is true even if YOU are completely caused by OTHER STUFF (for example, the brain causes the mind). Free will and determinism do not even exist in the same universe of discourse. They were never given the opportunity to be incompatible.
You have free will.
Whew, well this post was far too long. I’m off to bed. Damn, blogs take a lot of time…
Tags: determinism, free will