Why Free Will Does Not Exist
A philosophical take on whether you really have autonomy over your choices
Alex O’Conner, a popular philosophical YouTuber amongst other things, presents the argument against free will in the following manner:
Firstly, in order to poke holes at the idea of ‘free will’, a collective agreement on what this actually means is necessary.
Let’s stick with the most consistent idea most people have, which is the ability to choose what it is that we do.
This is the definition the argument will be grounded in.
In order for this to hold true, what would that have to mean?
- We would need to be aware of everything which influences our actions, i.e.
- Our emotions
- Environmental Factors
- Influences from past experiences
- Influences of people
- Where/when we were born
2. We would also need to be in complete control of all them, which is impossible. Many of these points above are in accordance with the idea of determinism, which posits that our actions are bound from a causal change of events.
Now consider the last mundane choice you made — may that be cycling or walking to work? Buying Chinese or Indian food for dinner?
Think about why you made that choice.
In order to choose one over the other, you must have wanted to do one more than the other. Taking the case of walking over cycling, you must have wanted to walk more than wanting to cycle.
This leads us to ask: Is it possible to control your wants? Simply, the answer is no. The want itself cannot be controlled or changed.
But let’s say you decided to act against this ‘want’ in the name of regaining your free will, and you chose to cycle instead of walking to work. This would essentially circulate you back to the same problem — why is your desire to gain your free will stronger than your desire to simply walk to work?
If this were simply not just the way it is, you would have just chosen to walk to work.
If in this case, you wanted to change your wants. You would have had to ‘want’ to not want it.
Alex then goes on to suggest that there are two fundamental reasons people purposely do things:
- They want to
- They are forced to
The latter is self explanatory, and we already discussed that our wants cannot be controlled, but as these are the only two reasons you will do something, you might then ask whether free will even exists?
Some philosophers believe that the illusion of free will only exists to aid survival. The decision may have been a free choice, but the choice is underpinned by a desire which is out of one’s control.
Perhaps it is more accurate to say that you can do what you want, but one is unable to choose what it is that they want.
More of Alex’s thought-provoking ideas can be found here.
The Science-y Stuff
In recent years, neuroscientists have joined the debate and have gone on to show that brain activity associated with decision-making occurs before we consciously perceive making a decision, raising questions about the extent of our conscious control over our actions.
“Using fMRI brain scans, these researchers were able to predict participants’ decisions as many as seven seconds before the subjects had consciously made the decisions. […] This prevents our mind from being overloaded by simple routine tasks.”
In this article, the lead researcher of this experiment Haynes highlighted that this is singlehandedly incapable of rewriting years of literature on free-will, but it is a starting point and can better help us understand our volitions.
The concept of free will remains a subject of profound philosophical and scientific debate. While determinism and various factors challenge the notion of absolute free will, the complexity of human consciousness and the interplay between internal and external motivations continue to shape our understanding of personal agency and the extent of our freedom to choose.
Thank you for reading! Feel free to drop your thoughts on this interesting subject which I only recently came to learn about :)
