Free Will: We're All Believers?
The idea of free will matters a lot to lots of people. This often leads them to try to argue for its existence.
I always end up pointing out that I don’t think you can prove it one way or another. And I’m pretty sure about this – people have been debating the subject with inconclusive results for thousands of years.
After reading a recent comment to the previous thread, I realized that it presented me not with an argument for believing in free will, but with two reasons for why it would be a bad thing if we didn’t have it:
1. If we didn’t have free will, then we would make no important life choices and decisions.
2. If we didn’t have free will, then we couldn’t give credit to disadvantaged individuals who have to struggle to overcome and succeed.
I’m realizing, however, that in a way these points actually do argue for free will’s existence. Because in fact we do congratulate people who better themselves, and we often encourage them to do so, as when we reward children for working to improve their grades. And all of us are aware of certain times in our lives when we made what felt like important life decisions.
So do these two points actually prove the existence of free will – or at least prove that all of us really do believe in it?
I always end up pointing out that I don’t think you can prove it one way or another. And I’m pretty sure about this – people have been debating the subject with inconclusive results for thousands of years.
After reading a recent comment to the previous thread, I realized that it presented me not with an argument for believing in free will, but with two reasons for why it would be a bad thing if we didn’t have it:
1. If we didn’t have free will, then we would make no important life choices and decisions.
2. If we didn’t have free will, then we couldn’t give credit to disadvantaged individuals who have to struggle to overcome and succeed.
I’m realizing, however, that in a way these points actually do argue for free will’s existence. Because in fact we do congratulate people who better themselves, and we often encourage them to do so, as when we reward children for working to improve their grades. And all of us are aware of certain times in our lives when we made what felt like important life decisions.
So do these two points actually prove the existence of free will – or at least prove that all of us really do believe in it?
Posted by Paul at 12:20 PM Permalink
19 Comments:
How about this.
We have free will, but, what does it matter?
Pontius Pilate?
Judas?
Einstein?
If any of these men had not done what they did...would it have happened, anyway?
Saw a great movie, though, and you might like it. Different....
The Man From Earth.
About a 14000 year old man.
That is, I don't see how it makes a difference in real life. Determinists don't just sit around waiting for stuff to happen to them. And I'm not aware of any evidence that people who believe in free will make more or more moral choices, have higher levels of energy etc.
PAULINE: To clarify, I have no second assessment. My first is what I believe - there's no proving it one way or another.
I said that those two points could be construed as evidence for free will or for implicit belief in it and asked if others find them compelling in either of those ways.
TO ALL: Notice that we haven't defined what "free will" is.
Exactly what free will is generally seems to be omitted from discussions of this topic but seems to me it would be a good thing to do...
Maybe, "the idea of radically free will is incoherent, and it seems very likely that we don't have free will of any sort, but gosh-darnit we can't really operate in the world if we don't at least pretend that we are free to choose."
MATTHEW: You're speaking to the question of what people mean when they say "free will." It seems to me too that if we have free will, it clearly isn't radically or perfectly free. For example, the set of choices that we face at any moment is an outcome of past events.
Your observation that whether or not we believe in free will doesn't seem to affect how people behave makes this issue highly speculative. To my mind, the lack of practical implications even raises the possibility that "Is the universe deterministic or do we have free will?" isn't such a good question - that is, if we knew more about how it all works, the answer might well be "Neither one of those..."
D and Bflat?
No...the forever arguement, is there a God?
Does it matter if we believe?
The answer may just be, if a person thinks they are alive, if that person believes they are alive, then, they believe in God.
Because the CREATOR IS all life.
Hmmmm
I think the basic idea - and I should say that frankly it's never made much sense to me, so hope I'm getting it right - is that God gave us free will so he could reward those who choose to believe in Him and send those who don't to hell.
(NOT saying that I think this is your view - I'm pretty sure it isn't, from past comments you've made to other threads.)
Until they do and in case the human will and intellect is NOT a part of this physical world and, therefore, not subject to its inflexible laws and is in fact capable of free choice, I think it is healthier for us to believe that we can have some control and that we can deliberately make decisions and choices that may rewrite the future and change its outcome for the better. Otherwise we feel powerless. Otherwise the world can look bleak. Otherwise we can fall into a state of pessimism.
Some events take place as a result of things that came before. I recognize that. But does everything happen as a result of things that came before? If everything in life is predetermined and happens as a result of everything that came before, if we have no control, then shouldn't we get rid of ideas such as chance, randomness, error, mistake, accident, chaos, coincidence, probability, possibility, blame, reward, moral responsibility and so on? Aren't these ideas only illusions in a world with inflexible laws that dictate the future down to the smallest detail?
If human beings do not have an intellect and will that is capable of being free, then why extend freedom to them as we do through our Constitution?
but that pesky hindsight is 20/20 and we can see how we were destined to make certian choices... or at least be able to track the path of our freedom to a given end.
so it goes. ;-)
Free will is limited by how a given person understands the concept. Some people feel they can do anything at anytime, with no consequences. The law of cause and effect reveals otherwise. Every action has implications. How you treat others in thoughts and emotions comes back at you from some direction. A disregard for ethics, for what is "right," means you do not yet love and accept everyone unconditionally. As free will is itself a teacher, you will experience how you treat others to learn what it feels like.
Free will is in similar to faith, trust, love and other internal soul experiences. You know it when you feel it. You know what feels right, even if you do not always consciously do it. A person can outwardly manifest certain visible traits or characteristics, but that does not teach another person how to feel. In this way, each person is on a very personal journey. As boneman says, people use free will very differently. This reveals aspects of personality and lingering karma. You decide what matters or if you will believe anything matters at all.
If physical reality contains genuine randomness, it seems to me that this isn’t evidence for free choice unless free choice is considered to be random behavior. And maybe that’s what it would take for a choice to be perfectly free.
But I bet that very few people on reflection would say that human choice is perfectly free. Clearly circumstances and past events influence us. In the other direction, I’ve never talked to anyone who said they believe that human thought and behavior is one hundred percent determined.
It sounds like you’re saying that if suddenly we could find out that our thoughts and behavior are 100% determined, you believe that formerly moral people would start to behave immorally and Americans would want to repeal the Constitution. These are cause and effect connections that I don’t see!
Also, if you’re right about firm belief in free will being the foundation of morality, then we’d expect criminals to hold to highly deterministic world views. But my best guess is that as a group, criminals aren’t particularly interested in philosophy.
So in the end, I don’t follow the connection you make between being/behaving as a good person and strongly believing in free will. For myself, I just kind of/tend to believe that we have some limited degree of choice but I’m not strongly convinced. I’m aware of a couple key points where I made what felt like major life decisions, but I really don’t know or even believe strongly that I would have been capable of making negative choices instead.
And when I made the positive choices, there wasn’t anything going on in my mind along the lines of, “OK, Paul… you know that you really do have free will, so you can do this…”
I really don’t see any practical implications to the free will/determinism debate at all. From time to time all of us in fact face situations where we have to go through the mental experience known as “making a choice” or decision regardless of whether the choice we make was predetermined.
LUKE: It seems to me that’s what it probably amounts to for most of us – in the end, we come down on the side of thinking we probably have free will to some degree because that’s how it feels. As you say, we can also recognize causal influences when we look back, so the idea that our choices are perfectly free looks incorrect.
LIARA: “Free will is in similar to faith, trust, love and other internal soul experiences. You know it when you feel it.”
There’s one important difference. To say that we know faith, trust or love is to say that we know something about how we feel – that we know our own direct experiences. But to say we know that we have free will is to claim that we know not just our own feelings or thought processes, but something about how the wider world operates – that in fact it is not entirely deterministic.
You have asked for a definition of free will and free choice. Here is how I understand it: A person has chosen freely when he could have chosen other than he did. You say this can't be proven because you can't go back in time to see if you would have really chosen other than you did. I don't think you need to go back in time in actuality. We go back in time frequently enough in our imagination and wish we had chosen otherwise back then because we KNOW that we KNEW back then we could have and should have chosen otherwise. Sometimes we do this within moments of having made a conscious choice before anything has had a chance to take place that changes the picture.
Further indications that free will probably exists is the fact that society behaves as if it does. Unless there is good reason not to as in the case of children or the insane, we usually hold a person responsible for his or her actions. In doing so, we acknowledge that the person had a choice and could have chosen other than he or she did. We have such concepts as duty, commitment, justice, merit, and responsibility. We understand that as members we have a contract with the community to abide by its laws. A judge does not accept the excuse "I wasn't motivated to keep the law." We think a person can be the author of his or her actions at least part of the time.
I brought up the idea of freedom and our Constitution to illustrate that we value freedom and think the individual has a right to it, because we think the individual does have a mind and will capable of being free. That was my point.
We are not always using the force of our will. We do not need to most of the time. We do not function every moment of the day by the sheer force of our will. It is only when we come face to face with a serious situation that calls upon us to choose that the will can come into play.
Individuals may not use terms like free will or determinism, but they may think that life has handed them a lemon and there isn't anything they can do about it. They may say "Well, that's just the way I was made and I can't change." Or they may say "It was just meant to be." Or, "It was just not meant to be." They are empowered if they believe that they can deliberately and freely make choices that have the potential to change things for the good.
"Yes, we can!" was the mantra of the Obama campaign. It represents the force of the community will. If the community were to get the idea that our planet was doomed from the start, the community might stop trying to save it.
You leave a small amount of room for free choice. I leave more room. I do not say that human choice is perfectly free all the time in all individuals. I say human choice can be relatively free a good part of the time for many individuals. We disagree as to the extent.
You are a good person. I admire you a lot. Yes, you have been blessed with certain gifts of your intelligence and talent for which you can't take credit. But of your goodness I believe you have been the author of that at least in part. I know you have probably submitted to certain good influences and useful disciplines that make it easier, but it must be by the sheer force of your will that you are able to keep going some days.
I am done debating this issue. I have spent a good part of two days reading about and wrestling with this free will issue. Thanks for the opportunity to do some heavy-duty thinking. But now it is time I shift gears and get busy with yard work. It is a beautiful day and my flower beds await me.
In your example, someone with a well-developed conscience would find it more painful to accept the bribe than to decline it. It could be argued that the person's aversion to that pain was determining his or her response.
SUSIEQ: That sounds about right - that on free will, we have a different feel for the extent. Also, to me it doesn’t seem like how one comes down on this issue makes a practical difference.
Whether your genes and environment determined you'd do some yard work today or whether you freely chose to or whether you were influenced by your genes and environment yet exerted some measure of free choice - nobody knows for sure, but regardless, you're doing some yard work.
And I have a very positive sense of who you are as a person too. (Also Vishesh! I've known both of you a pretty long time...)
hope you'll check it out!
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