Free Will

Mainpage / E-Mail / Facebook / Twitter

Free Will

Intro

Does free will exist? The question continues to haunt us. We want to know the answer. Why?  Well, it comes down to the meaning of life stuff. Are we just actors on a stage, acting out some script? Is life meaningless, just some story we are in? Do we have a destiny? Are our lives predetermined? Something that has de facto already happened? Or can we decide for ourselves what we will do? Are we free to chose our paths? Do we have a choice? Do we have free will?

Some say yes. After all, we can choose to go to the mall, or to the bookstore. To pick up strawberries or apples. It is up to us. We can choose to follow orders, or not. It is the free will concept distilled out of the free will experience. I experience that i can choose freely, so i have free will.

Others say no. We humans are the product of everything we went through in life. Each previous data entry into our brains influences our actions in a subsequent situation, and the experience of that situation then forms another data entry in our minds, co-determining future behavior, along with all the older data entries. Furthermore we have a set of hard-coded instructions from our DNA that influence all behavior and co-shape our minds, along side our experiences. Instructions for breathing, mating, recognizing objects, etc. So nothing we do or want to do is ever truly free. Everything we do and want is predetermined. Whether or not our actions are coerced by some outside source doesn't matter.

Definition

The first step in the process of getting to the bottom of free will is relatively straightforward. We first need to define free will. After that, we can probably more clearly see what's what.

Our notion of free will comes simply from the experience of situations in which the choice of action seems entirely up to us, free from the interference of others. This is can be a good definition of freedom. However it is not a definition of free will persé.

So how do we define it? Well, what is a will, and when is it free? Here is the Cambridge dictionary definition of will: 

will noun (MENTAL POWER)

the mental power used to control and direct your thoughts and actions, or a determination to do something, despite any difficulties or opposition:
 

From an early age she had a very strong will.
After six months in hospital she began to lose the will to live (= the desire and determination to stay alive).

Will is defined as some kind of mental power. Or it is used to describe a desire or a determination. Desire has an object. So does determination. And when you think about it, so do control and direction. An object, a goal, a destination. Something to reach. So will could be defined as the mental powers to control and direct your thoughts and actions towards a goal.

And here we come to the crux. What is a will without and object? Nothing...? Can willpower decide without any preference? No, it can't. It's a contradiction. Will implies a preference, a desire, a goal, an object. It is always tied to that. And this goal is predetermined. It comes from our mind, from our experiences or hardcoded DNA programming (or from an outside influence). It can never be free of a certain predetermined influence.

Let's look at it this way. Suppose you have in front of you an apple and an orange. 


Me:  which one will you choose to eat first?

You: I choose to eat the orange, because it tastes better.

Me: well then your choice was predetermined. Your taste buds influence your choice along with previous experiences of eating these fruits.

You: OK OK, well let's strip away taste.

Me: well which one do you choose now?

You: the orange again.

Me: why?

You: i like the color..

Me: well, again a predetermination.

You: well, let's then strip away everything. Taste, color, size, shape, any previous experience or knowledge, and hunger.

Me: which one will you choose then?

You: i don't know..

You can now only make a choice now between the two fruit via a random fluctuation that does produce some kind of property that is desirable. Perhaps you prefer left over right. Or close-by over further away. Or you could flip a coin. But then who decides? Not your free will.

And here we are. Without some kind of predetermination will is useless. It might as well not exist. So where does that leave us? First of all with clues to the definition of free will. We know now that will is never free in the sense of without predetermination. Will always has a predetermined object, without it, it does effectively not exist. So the free in free will could just be defined as freedom from outside interference (with the predetermination comming from your own mind instead of from outside).

And now we arrive at a workable definition: free will is the ability to control and direct our thoughts and actions towards a goal chosen based upon our own internal motivation which was predetermined by some kind of previous experience.

Perhaps a little shorter:  free will is the ability to direct our thoughts towards a goal of our own choosing.

Now what

So where does this leaves us? Is this acceptable? Are we now royally screwed? Does this mean that we are not free but live out some script? Is meaninglessness now approaching us like a dark menacing cloud? Are we just a page in a book?

Well...we already determined that without some kind of incentive, some little setting in our brain, some piece of data to guide our decision ... we can't decide! If there was no difference to us between an apple and an orange, if they were just meaningless object A and meaningless object B, we simply could not pick between them. So, in order to want something, well, we need the wanting part. We need this little piece of data, this predetermined thingy, that lets us choose and then enjoy the choice.

Furthermore, few people experience happiness if another persons tells them what to do. It's not so bad if it happens once in a while, but we all like to choose by and for ourselves from most of the time.

So you can find happiness in the definition we arrived at. Free from others, but thank God for the little voice in our heads that expresses desire.

Then there is the matter of the meaning of live stuff.. For some of us, predetermination really screws up the meaning part. We can ask ourselves the following: does it matter if predetermination exists or not? How does it work anyway? We already proposed at the beginning that we are all made of experiences. Well, how many? A countless bunch.. Some memorable, a lot of then not. How could you tell which one influenced a specific action you took? In most cases you can't. Often multiple experiences influence one action. And next to this, each experience you have had was itself determined by a convergence of a countless number of simultaneous occurrences. The temperature that moment, the sounds in the air, the amount of photons hitting you, the movements of the 8 billion or so other people on the planet..

Let's look at it via a little scenario.

Suppose you are at home in a big city waiting for a parcel to arrive via courier. The parcel is late. How are you going to react? Angry? With understanding? Snobbishly? Irritated? Well we can't know unless we enter some data into the matrix, so to speak. Here is a little data entry. 

Suppose your day went badly. Your boss suddenly fired you for a stupid reason, with the underlying motivation clearly being his long held dislike. You are upset and pacing back and forth in your living room. Where is that damn parcel? You are ready to snap at whomever comes to the door. The doorbell rings and here is the delivery man. It's an immigrant from Africa. You see a kind face with bright eyes. Before you can say anything the young man cheerfully apologizes and explains that his boss selected him for one last run even though he just went off duty, and he first had to pick up his mother from hospital where she received vaccinations. He hopes you don't mind too much.



What choice do you now make? Do you scold the young man anyway? Or do you melt to his charm? Well... what is the predetermination in this situation? Can we calculate it and determine exactly how you will react? Perhaps you are anti immigrant. Maybe you have sympathy for black people. It could be that you are not a very nice person. And what about the delivery man? Perhaps the guy that had the route your house is on took off from work early that day to play the latest version of grand-theft auto, without informing his boss. Maybe the boss gave the job to the man from Africa because he knows immigrants rarely refuse out of fear. Perhaps the mother had to wait a long time at the hospital and thus couldn't be picked up in time by the man's brother, who had a job interview scheduled. A zillion factors could potentially have been of influence on the situation, and on you.

From this we can conclude that in most cases predetermination might as well be random chance when it comes to human experiences. And when it is not, we don't worry about it. It feels good to know why we were angry.. we lost our job! It would be a real bother if we were angry without explanation. Or better said, without predetermination.

Conclusion

We can if we want to define free will as follows: 

Free will is the ability to direct our thoughts towards a goal of our own choosing.

If we use this definition, free will exists.

We can deal with predetermination as follows:

Are we just actors on a stage? Perhaps... Does it matter? No.


So why did we ask the question does free will exist in the first place?

We asked because we are concerned with meaning-of-life-stuff. Sadly we misunderstood the meaning of the word will and of made an error in our concept of free ... and then put them together! Instinctively we include in our concept of free the absence of any kind of influence. Even our own internal motivations. We do this because we follow a false logic. Free has an object. You are free from, not just free. And the ultimate status of free is being free from everything. We can't see that this ultimate status is equivalent to oblivion. Following the free from everything idea will eventually include protons and electrons. Next we ignore that without motivation, there can be no will.

If you put them together you get this: 0.

Or in otherwords, free will is thus defined in error as: free will is the ability to direct our thoughts and actions towards a goal nobody chose and has no meaning at all to us.

Free will is a contradiction in terms, unless you excluded your own motivation from the concept of free.

Happy? Please post your thoughts.