Free Will vs Determinism
Everything I learned about this central question in philosophy.
I first heard about it during my intro to philosophy class. “Whether we have free will or whether we do not?” was the week’s topic. I thought it seemed like a good argument: I did have a choice in every decision I made, didn’t I?
Free will is the idea that we are self determined: that it is our choice to act and behave based on our free will.
Then we learned about many other relevant theories like “Determinism” (the most appealing of them all) — that human consciousness is essentially completely determined and that there are previous events to all events.
This is the theory I argued for during the rest of my papers that week.
Determinism is the idea that all events are set in place by previous ones, including our mental functions.
In the end, it seemed to all boil down to the explanation of cause and effect — in which there is a prior event to every other event (this same idea has led to certain theories like the one that boasts that all life can be completely predicted through a perfect understanding of the world, which I thought was pretty cool).
I later learned that today there were already many neuroscientific efforts that had shown us just how much the idea of determinism was ingrained into our lives: how our environment and genetics determined a lot about how we’d turn out, and how all the changes in our brain chemistry constantly altered our everyday behavior (which is why we have many types of behavior-changing/affecting drugs like alcohol or antipsychotics for the desired and known effects).
This and a lot more things helped me conclude that it was not only some thoughts, memories, hopes, or dreams that could be determined, but in essence, all of them.
A brief explanation of what I learned and the things that convinced me
Determinists can be divided into hard determinists and compatibilists, depending on their views about morality.
A hard determinist is a determinist that rules out morally relevant free will.
A compatibilist is someone who believes that free will and determinism can, in some way, coexist.
Simply put, determinism is incompatible with the idea of free will & making our own deliberate choices. This is because free will requires the ability to have acted differently in any given situation or circumstance.
Understanding that helps conclude that we simply cannot act freely if our actions are caused by forces over which we have no control.
Furthermore, by virtue of our brains’ uniqueness, we feel like we are the force that controls everything that plays in front of our eyes, and so it seems impossible that it may be otherwise — it feels like we always have a say in every moment in our lives.
As humans, we’ve always evolved to make sense of things and we’ve disliked the idea of not knowing.
However, when we actually prompt the relevant questions, we learn to understand the mere conclusion that this is just one of the many problems within human perception (which we have evidently already unraveled).
Between picking an orange or picking an apple, or deciding not to pick anything at all, every decision has a previous event or causation.
It may feel like a lot of our decisions are unique to their moment, but there are several small mental events that subconsciously go on inside our minds to help us deal with these types of simple or repetitive tasks in life.
- Our brain is lazy, but it is also very efficient, so it prioritizes most things that are valuable to it in life to help store mental energy for more important tasks.
- Driving, walking, writing, etc. are all tasks that we have learned to do on autopilot — because actively thinking about things like this is considered a waste of mental energy for our brains.
“Atomic Habits” by James Clear and “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari are my recommendations for learning about habits and the brief evolution of humankind.
The deliberate acts that we associate with free will and the conscious experience happen only after the fact that things have already been set in motion.
There are two systems of thought that can help us better understand how we make choices
The 1st system, slow thinking, is our better system — better to effectively make difficult decisions. While the 2nd system, the swift and faster intuition, relies on our subconscious thought to shape most of our judgment.
And usually, it is the “fast” thinking system that people mistake for being this “free will” but this is clearly wrong as even that system requires prior preparation before any decision can actually ever be made.
If you’re interested in how this actually works you can go read “Thinking Fast & Slow” by Danielle Kahneman.
Preferences and Desires
The final idea to support what I learned is that it all comes down to our desires.
We are free to act upon our desires, but we are not free to decide upon what those desires themselves will be.
We have a set of preferences or desires (values, biases, feelings, fears, etc.), all of which are the results of prior causes like genetics, environment, society, etc.
This means that a lot of us will do anything that allows us to survive, be happy, be healthy, feel successful, and many other of our desires, but we will never be able to make choices outside of those desires.
Randomness is also not a good argument to help free will as it only states that we are not in control of random events, and free will requires control (Indeterminism).
If we cannot have control over any of this, then free will is simply out of the question as it requires control in these sorts of situations.
The Rising Question: Moral Responsibility w/o Free Will
In a very deep sense, criminals and negatively perceived people in society are not actually responsible for their actions in life.
Although people who believe in free will may deem them as being morally wrong, the realization here is that they are not to blame and they are not to be held morally accountable for their actions.
There are a lot of historical and modern problems that today’s prison systems and punishment/deterring ideologies have created across societies. The right way of solving such problems is to focus on the central underlying causes of such violence and “criminal” activities to prevent them and realistically help people instead of just contributing to the overall problem.
This form of thinking can help us rehabilitate all types of people back into society, and prevent further types of offending in all parts of the world.
Moreover, we can get rid of vengeful and anger-fueled feelings that constantly cloud our judgment. We can become more rational beings for our own betterment.
And yes, when a large percentage of people stop believing that they are free agents, they do stop seeing themselves as blameworthy for their actions.
For a long time, we have held the misconception that the threat and theory of punishment as a deterrent is the only good way to constrain criminal behavior. However, there have been countless studies that prove that rehabilitative theories of justice are much more effective than punishment as a deterrent for criminal activity.
We should be focusing on the causes and roots of these problems to better create environments that can help rehabilitate people back into society.
I recommend reading Sam Harris’ book on Free Will for more information on why a determinist perspective is much better for the future of our society, instead of having to live with the illusion of free will.
My Final Thoughts: A More Realistic Perspective
It would be dishonest to let the illusion of free will run most of our lives as it creates just another obstacle in the eyes of progress and reality.
Also, remember not to mistake determinism with the idea of fatalism, as these are extremely different, and our decisions in life really matter.
The fatalist makes the mistake of comparing the lack of freedom to a lack of control or of influence over future outcomes.
In actuality, our efforts do make a difference, in a meaningful way, and we must preserve them for the sake of the ethical efforts of our society.
And remember to always define concepts clearly and responsibly, so that you do not end up in pointless rabbitholes.
To our minds, our future is still unknown and that’s all that really matters.
For some, the solution to this problem is to deliberately ignore the matter, and behave as if one has free will.
But for the vast majority of us who can balance the idea and properly dissect it, the solution is to accept that there is no free will and to instead focus on how we can better reflect this idea across systems that have notoriously been based upon the idea of free will.
In the past, when perception went up against reality, perception triumphed over reality, but in the present and in the future, as we learn more and more about the world, reality will in fact always triumph over perception.
In some way or another, there were a series of events that lead you to read this article, and so, I hope this event leads you to more insightful events in life.
Thanks for reading.
Untitled Poet.
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