The Free Will Cycle

Okay, here we go.

I have been planning, since I started this blog, to write out my five arguments showing that free will is possible. I have been putting this off because of the last semester, which was crazy-busy . . . Which you can tell from my utter dearth of posts throughout April. So, to make up for it, over the next few days I am going to write my long-awaited Free Will Cycle.

In this post, I am just going to lay some groundwork concerning the issue of free will. There is no doubt that free will is a big deal, whether it exists or not. Whether we should be held accountable for our actions is a huge, fuzzy bear-question grumbling over the heads of our judicial system every day. Do we see people as in control, and therefore punishable for what they do? Or do we see them as programmed by society, genetics, chance, whatever . . . and if not, therefore, in control of the persons they are, then do we find some means other than punishment, or notions of responsibility? If there is free will, there is responsibility. If there is no free will, we must figure out how to preserve justice without it.

This political dilemma is not my goal to solve. As I see it, to err on the side of caution we should probably always treat people as if they are badly-caused when they do something wrong, and not assume they are freely acting badly - and that when someone does something good, we should treat them as freely acting well. This may seem paradoxical, but I believe this not because of my direct beliefs about free will. I believe this because I think it promotes a healthy social environment. For running a society, the question of free will offers little in terms of personal satisfaction or whatever; the problem of free will for society is basically, how do we mete out justice fairly? For me, we should always treat mistakes as if they were resulting from bad causation (or at least almost always), and we should probably always treat people as accountable for the good they do. This seems reasonable. But I am not offering a real, solid philosophical argument here - just what I think will be practical and less likely to cause problems in the grander scheme of things.

Instead, my question of free will is not starting at the social level, but the intensely personal level. Do I have free will? I am asking this for all of us, in a sense. Do all of us, personally, privately, have free will? Is this concept possible? We must admit that as humans, it doesn't seem that we are completely free. Things seem to impinge our "wills" all the time - whatever a "will" is. If what we want is so often difficult to obtain, even sometimes against ourselves, then we can't possibly be completely free. So, we must decide whether we think free will is at all possible.

Personally, I find individual responsibility to be extremely important. I feel very responsible, and it seems too deeply rooted, to common sensical a position to relinquish on the grounds of any philosophical argument. The feeling of responsibility I get at having made a mistake is simply too overwhelming for me to dismiss as an illusion of poorly understood causation. I will assume, therefore, that my feeling of responsibility is pointing towards something real. If responsibility is real, then I can be held accountable; if I can be held accountable, then somehow I am acting in a way determined by me, not by outside forces, bad upbringing, bad circumstances, etc. Somehow, some way, I act freely.

Here is the argument against free will:

1. If we are completely caused, we cannot be free. If one hundred million different factors go into causing my actions, then all of those different variables make me act. It is not me who acts, as it were, but my causes which form me into myself. My genetics, my environment, my imbedded beliefs, and so forth. Therefore, to be wholly caused is to be wholly unfree.

2. If we are partially random, we are still not free. The part of us that is caused is not free because it was determined by circumstances prior; the part of us that is not caused and happens sporadically is not free because by definition randomness means 'lack of control.' If I act randomly, without my own consent, I am not responsible. Imagine, for example, if suddenly your body started ignoring your mental commands and started killing people against your will. This would be random, perhaps, but not free in any sense. Therefore, randomness is in no sense more free than causation.

This, I admit, is a forceful, amazingly succinct argument, probably the cleanest philosophical point ever made. But, it stands so diametrically opposed to our experience. Whenever I act according to my will, I feel that I am doing so freely. Sometimes, I act against my will; sometimes I act because of forces within me I that make me feel unfree, but I feel as if my freedom is being impinged by my own nature, not that I do not have freedom in those moments. Somehow, we must reconcile our intense perception of freedom with our rational argument above. Our options are to either say that "free will" is an illusion caused by our lack of understanding of causation, and perhaps randomness, which goes into our behavior, or that somehow, inspite of our understanding of causation and randomness, we are still free.

Our challenge, then, is to, somehow, show that free will is neither caused nor random. This is an almost ridiculous challenge. How can anything, at all, be neither caused nor random? I believe I have an answer, though it will come later. All I will do in this blog is list, in order, the arguments for free will I will be presenting here.

1. The Nature of Experience Argument: "That hurt!" "No, it didn't!"

2. The Nature of Qualia Argument: "This is what blue feels like."

3. The Romantic Argument: Coleridge's Imagination

4. The God Argument (Not what you think, I promise!)

5. The Metaphysical Argument: Possibility, Probability, Actuality

With these five arguments, I hope to prove that the case against free will has been weakened. I feel that all of these arguments have valid points and make it so that the idea of hard determinism is perhaps less certain than it is usually presented as. Generally forms of #1 and #4 are highlighted by Free Will Defenders, though my form is slightly different than what you're probably used to. Anyway, I hope they will be enjoyable.

Quickly, I want to mention that there are other kinds of arguments for free will. None of them satisfy me, and so I will not be going into depth on them here. The most interesting, perhaps, is the "cognitively closed" argument: that perhaps our minds can't graps HOW we are free, even though we can grasp that we ARE free, just like we can't grasp the WHOLE of infinity, but we can grasp the IDEA of infinity. Another is the idea that it is impossible to, while making a choice, also believe that we are not free: "Hmm, what choice shall I make? Butter, or margarine? Of course, what I will choose is determined by causal forces, but, still . . . Hmmm . . . Which shall I choose?" These arguments are interesting, so far as they go, but they are really only variants of #1 and do not at all tackle the main argument presented by hard determinists. My five arguments, at least some of them, intend to do so, or at least to prove that such a thing is not necessary to defend free will.

I will be posting #1 soon, probably in the next day or so. Take care!