Alright, so maybe this is a bit oversimplified, but it made me giggle.
The thing is, though, that the issue of free will has been, is, and probably will always be just that - an issue. "Free Will" can be defined as "...a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives," though perhaps a more concise, to the point definition can be taken as "freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention." In any event, I'm sure the vast majority of individuals of average circumstance in the developed world have considered this problem at some point and to some degree, and are at least somewhat familiar with it. It is difficult, truly, to discuss this issue at length without (unfortunately) resorting to highly technical terminology, but I will avoid this where possible, and where I don't, I will do my best to explain away potential confusion.
What we should first examine, I think, is the way one's view on this matter may arise and develop. Often, many of one's philosophical opinions arise necessarily from antecedent views - namely, metaphysical or epistemological ones (a metaphysics can be very roughly defined as a theory of reality, and an epistemology as a theory of knowledge...though even a superficial examination will show that one often bleeds into the other). The two most evident cases are the ancient Greeks on the side of our having free will, and most modern metaphysicians on the side of our not having it.
Plato (which I will perhaps erroneously take as representative of a large portion of ancient Greek thought) posited that the will is free as a result of his metaphysical theory of Forms, which holds (crudely put, mind you) that physical reality is governed by and partakes of Forms - pure, idealized, abstract objects exemplifying their properties. The physical world is imperfect, and cannot achieve the perfection of the Forms, but in striving to do so produces the eternal motion of the cosmos - we may think of this as the cycles through which things move and exist, be it life/death or universal expansion/contraction (or entrophy). Mind, or consciousness, is one of these pure substances, and is in fact taken as among the highest and most influential in his metaphysics. In his view, body is enslaved by the manipulative, willing capacities of mind just as the physical world is so controlled by the Forms, though the mind is somewhat blinded and corrupted by the nature of bodily wants/needs/desires, and as such cannot achieve true purity until death. The pursuit of pure knowledge and truth, however, is a choice one can make. To Plato, mind can and will exist separately from the body upon biological death because of its very nature (he has an argument for this, which I'll discuss if anyone happens to be interested). This first bit is actually quite intuitive, I think - for we can easily consider a situation as simple as deciding to move one's arm as apparently evident of this view, and may be quite tempted to interject that one did this because he/she willed it.
A modern metaphysician, however, would contend that Plato's stream of causation is completely the opposite of what is really happening. To such thinkers, consciousness arises directly from the body - the brain - and is simply a survival tool, an emergent property, of it. In the case of one's deciding to move his/her arm, this action was not willed, but necessarily performed as a result of bodily processes: willing it to happen is simply a consequence - an illusion. This view is notably less mystical than the Platonic view - it arises, indeed, from modern science (roughly beginning in the late 17th Century, and going stronger than ever before through modernity). The more information about the universe (and the human body in particular) that we gather, the more things we've come to tend to feel as though we can explain away. This tendency gave rise to materialism - the view that the only thing that exists is matter, nothing more or less, and that all events are a result of material interaction. This metaphysics had obvious epistemological consequences - many have come to hold that consciousness is itself a result of the sequence of biochemical/electrical/structural brain states experienced by a given individual. Remember when you wanted Cap'n Crunch instead of a Pop-Tart this morning? That was influenced by every event through which your body has gone since conception - your conscious mind had nothing at all to do with it. Buying this? The vast majority of modern scientists and philosophers of metaphysics alike do, and it's gotten a lot of reinforcement from ongoing developments in neuroscience. Certainly, the undeniable relationship between tampering with a human brain and producing expected results seems to be pretty clear evidence. The pervasive view, in summation, is that given enough knowledge about the physical world, we can potentially explain any and every event - we just aren't there yet. Is this intuitive, though? Do you feel as though every thought that runs through your head - every decision you make - could simply be body-language translated into the illusion of meaningful consciousness?
I'm not going to offer any solutions. Of that, you can be certain. I shall, however, point out a few implications and issues that arise from either view.
I'll first pick on the 'no free will' side. First and foremost, quantum physics lies in direct opposition with a deterministic view - on a subatomic level, things do appear to have a lack of predictable governance. A strike against this view, for sure, though these very same researchers often turn around and posit determinism once again once you climb high enough up the complexity scale (in other words, things are only nondeterministic at the subatomic level - we still don't have free will). One of the most obvious questions raised against this view is this: if we indeed have no capacity to make free choices, how is it that anyone can ever be responsible for an action? Anyone can see where this is going - where is the room for praise or blame? This has some serious moral consequences (which would drive Kant nuts, as his views on freedom of will arose directly from his ethics)...in this materialistic view, there really is no such thing as 'morality' at all, but rather sets of sociocultural norms which one can follow or not (this is commonly referred to as Moral Relativism, a la Nietzsche). If you agree that there is no such thing as freedom of will, blaming a mass murderer for slaughtering handfuls of people is bare-bones hypocritical. Are any of us really willing to live with this consequence of eliminating personal responsibility? Very few, I'd wager. Indeed, some have tried to reconcile this view with our gut notions of morality, but it hasn't been too successful. Also, on a lighter but just as poignant note, if we are truly hardwired from birth to behave in a certain pattern, why is it that we think in any discernable way at all? Why are we not, for lack of a better term, just machines?
The 'free will' side of things isn't faring much better. First and foremost, there is no logical proof for the existence of free will, and there never will be (I say 'logical proof' because an empirical proof is quite out of the question). The existence of consciousness independent of a body is something that hasn't been and likely can't be proven, either. There have been some compelling arguments made, but none really hold enough water. Furthermore, in light of the sort of work being done with the brain and its obvious tie to things such as memory and particular talents, appealing to the possible array of different particular tastes one might have won't get anyone very far. Many use the word 'mystical' (as I did in describing Plato's view) in reference to arguments for freedom of will, and it's not entirely unwarranted - you can't appeal to empirical data, which is what those interested in knowledge in this day and age want to hear. Most of us probably think that our actions are chosen, but the burden of proof falls naturally on the one making the more unsupported claim, so we're left with very little to work with. In actuality, one can't really make the claim anymore that mind controls body entirely - take a chunk out of my hippocampus and I'll forget I just met you, what I did last night, and so on.
So where does 'god' fit into all this? Anywhere you want to fit one, basically. Considering the problem, it's not difficult to see that either side of the story can work a god concept in. In the case of free will, one can argue that we have it as 'god-given,' though I don't suggest such a silly and weak argument be taken seriously. If one were to explain that free will exists to necessitate the existence of dynamism and variance of character from person to person, however, things get a bit more interesting. After all, we have a capacity to think to ourselves, often quite abstractly and about things that do not pertain to our experience at all...if we were mere programmed machines, what would be the reason for this? This is what people can formulate into a 'god concept,' not in speaking of a Christian sort of god (big bearded man in the sky), but of a principle which gives things the purpose and capacity to differ toward some end (this is called a 'teleology,' from the Greek word 'telos,' translated as 'purpose'). A no-free-will advocate could claim, however, something to the note of the 'watchmaker' theory of god, holding that a first principle set everything in motion according to a particular plan, which will play out exactly as it was meant to regardless of what seems to be the opinions/drives/wants of its components. This could go on and on, but the main thing I meant to be taken from it is that the idea of a god doesn't really pull either side out of the holes they dig.
So what do you think - did you read all of this because you chose to, or was this determined?
The thing is, though, that the issue of free will has been, is, and probably will always be just that - an issue. "Free Will" can be defined as "...a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives," though perhaps a more concise, to the point definition can be taken as "freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention." In any event, I'm sure the vast majority of individuals of average circumstance in the developed world have considered this problem at some point and to some degree, and are at least somewhat familiar with it. It is difficult, truly, to discuss this issue at length without (unfortunately) resorting to highly technical terminology, but I will avoid this where possible, and where I don't, I will do my best to explain away potential confusion.
What we should first examine, I think, is the way one's view on this matter may arise and develop. Often, many of one's philosophical opinions arise necessarily from antecedent views - namely, metaphysical or epistemological ones (a metaphysics can be very roughly defined as a theory of reality, and an epistemology as a theory of knowledge...though even a superficial examination will show that one often bleeds into the other). The two most evident cases are the ancient Greeks on the side of our having free will, and most modern metaphysicians on the side of our not having it.
Plato (which I will perhaps erroneously take as representative of a large portion of ancient Greek thought) posited that the will is free as a result of his metaphysical theory of Forms, which holds (crudely put, mind you) that physical reality is governed by and partakes of Forms - pure, idealized, abstract objects exemplifying their properties. The physical world is imperfect, and cannot achieve the perfection of the Forms, but in striving to do so produces the eternal motion of the cosmos - we may think of this as the cycles through which things move and exist, be it life/death or universal expansion/contraction (or entrophy). Mind, or consciousness, is one of these pure substances, and is in fact taken as among the highest and most influential in his metaphysics. In his view, body is enslaved by the manipulative, willing capacities of mind just as the physical world is so controlled by the Forms, though the mind is somewhat blinded and corrupted by the nature of bodily wants/needs/desires, and as such cannot achieve true purity until death. The pursuit of pure knowledge and truth, however, is a choice one can make. To Plato, mind can and will exist separately from the body upon biological death because of its very nature (he has an argument for this, which I'll discuss if anyone happens to be interested). This first bit is actually quite intuitive, I think - for we can easily consider a situation as simple as deciding to move one's arm as apparently evident of this view, and may be quite tempted to interject that one did this because he/she willed it.
A modern metaphysician, however, would contend that Plato's stream of causation is completely the opposite of what is really happening. To such thinkers, consciousness arises directly from the body - the brain - and is simply a survival tool, an emergent property, of it. In the case of one's deciding to move his/her arm, this action was not willed, but necessarily performed as a result of bodily processes: willing it to happen is simply a consequence - an illusion. This view is notably less mystical than the Platonic view - it arises, indeed, from modern science (roughly beginning in the late 17th Century, and going stronger than ever before through modernity). The more information about the universe (and the human body in particular) that we gather, the more things we've come to tend to feel as though we can explain away. This tendency gave rise to materialism - the view that the only thing that exists is matter, nothing more or less, and that all events are a result of material interaction. This metaphysics had obvious epistemological consequences - many have come to hold that consciousness is itself a result of the sequence of biochemical/electrical/structural brain states experienced by a given individual. Remember when you wanted Cap'n Crunch instead of a Pop-Tart this morning? That was influenced by every event through which your body has gone since conception - your conscious mind had nothing at all to do with it. Buying this? The vast majority of modern scientists and philosophers of metaphysics alike do, and it's gotten a lot of reinforcement from ongoing developments in neuroscience. Certainly, the undeniable relationship between tampering with a human brain and producing expected results seems to be pretty clear evidence. The pervasive view, in summation, is that given enough knowledge about the physical world, we can potentially explain any and every event - we just aren't there yet. Is this intuitive, though? Do you feel as though every thought that runs through your head - every decision you make - could simply be body-language translated into the illusion of meaningful consciousness?
I'm not going to offer any solutions. Of that, you can be certain. I shall, however, point out a few implications and issues that arise from either view.
I'll first pick on the 'no free will' side. First and foremost, quantum physics lies in direct opposition with a deterministic view - on a subatomic level, things do appear to have a lack of predictable governance. A strike against this view, for sure, though these very same researchers often turn around and posit determinism once again once you climb high enough up the complexity scale (in other words, things are only nondeterministic at the subatomic level - we still don't have free will). One of the most obvious questions raised against this view is this: if we indeed have no capacity to make free choices, how is it that anyone can ever be responsible for an action? Anyone can see where this is going - where is the room for praise or blame? This has some serious moral consequences (which would drive Kant nuts, as his views on freedom of will arose directly from his ethics)...in this materialistic view, there really is no such thing as 'morality' at all, but rather sets of sociocultural norms which one can follow or not (this is commonly referred to as Moral Relativism, a la Nietzsche). If you agree that there is no such thing as freedom of will, blaming a mass murderer for slaughtering handfuls of people is bare-bones hypocritical. Are any of us really willing to live with this consequence of eliminating personal responsibility? Very few, I'd wager. Indeed, some have tried to reconcile this view with our gut notions of morality, but it hasn't been too successful. Also, on a lighter but just as poignant note, if we are truly hardwired from birth to behave in a certain pattern, why is it that we think in any discernable way at all? Why are we not, for lack of a better term, just machines?
The 'free will' side of things isn't faring much better. First and foremost, there is no logical proof for the existence of free will, and there never will be (I say 'logical proof' because an empirical proof is quite out of the question). The existence of consciousness independent of a body is something that hasn't been and likely can't be proven, either. There have been some compelling arguments made, but none really hold enough water. Furthermore, in light of the sort of work being done with the brain and its obvious tie to things such as memory and particular talents, appealing to the possible array of different particular tastes one might have won't get anyone very far. Many use the word 'mystical' (as I did in describing Plato's view) in reference to arguments for freedom of will, and it's not entirely unwarranted - you can't appeal to empirical data, which is what those interested in knowledge in this day and age want to hear. Most of us probably think that our actions are chosen, but the burden of proof falls naturally on the one making the more unsupported claim, so we're left with very little to work with. In actuality, one can't really make the claim anymore that mind controls body entirely - take a chunk out of my hippocampus and I'll forget I just met you, what I did last night, and so on.
So where does 'god' fit into all this? Anywhere you want to fit one, basically. Considering the problem, it's not difficult to see that either side of the story can work a god concept in. In the case of free will, one can argue that we have it as 'god-given,' though I don't suggest such a silly and weak argument be taken seriously. If one were to explain that free will exists to necessitate the existence of dynamism and variance of character from person to person, however, things get a bit more interesting. After all, we have a capacity to think to ourselves, often quite abstractly and about things that do not pertain to our experience at all...if we were mere programmed machines, what would be the reason for this? This is what people can formulate into a 'god concept,' not in speaking of a Christian sort of god (big bearded man in the sky), but of a principle which gives things the purpose and capacity to differ toward some end (this is called a 'teleology,' from the Greek word 'telos,' translated as 'purpose'). A no-free-will advocate could claim, however, something to the note of the 'watchmaker' theory of god, holding that a first principle set everything in motion according to a particular plan, which will play out exactly as it was meant to regardless of what seems to be the opinions/drives/wants of its components. This could go on and on, but the main thing I meant to be taken from it is that the idea of a god doesn't really pull either side out of the holes they dig.
So what do you think - did you read all of this because you chose to, or was this determined?
