The idea of “Free Will” can be a difficult one to pin down, and it seems like there’s an awful lot of disagreement over a term that’s so vaguely defined. What, exactly, does “Free Will” mean? What does it mean to say that something has free will?
Generally, when we say someone has free will, we mean they have the ability to choose. And not just choose, but choose in defiance of all outside influence. Often this is posed as a great moral dilemma, but to keep things simple, I’ll use the example of choosing between ice cream flavors. You could have been raised all your life to think that chocolate is the greatest flavor, but still choose vanilla in the end – this is what I like to call “social” free will, or, the idea that no matter how deep the social conditioning, you can still choose to defy it. Or, you could have a very strong hunger for strawberry, but still in the end choose chocolate. This is “biological” free will, or, the idea that there is no one biological urge that sheer willpower cannot overcome.
The problem with both of these ideas is that the reality of social conditioning and biological urges tends to be simplified to downplay just how pervasive they are. Someone once gave me, as an example of the demonstration of “free will”, the fact that one of their friends had been pushed by their parents to become an engineer, but they had chosen to become an artist instead. Defying the wishes of their parents proved their capacity for free will.
But the reality about social conditioning is that it’s much, much more complex than simply “Your parents tell you what to do.” Her parents may have pressured her to become an engineer. But what about her friends? If you have a friend that’s an artist that extols the virtue of their craft, that’s social conditioning too. So is broader culture, which may romanticize the career of an artist, or glorify the idea of rebelling against authority figures, influencing people to defy their parents. All this is social conditioning, as well.
And then there’s the biological aspect as well. We’ve all probably felt the primitive flash of anger and imagined getting violent with someone who’s been frustrating us, particularly as children, and we’ve been able to resist that urge and calm ourselves down, so we may be sympathetic to the idea that there is nothing about our biology that we cannot defy. But biology works in a million more subtle ways than that. For example, the student who defied her parents to become an artist instead of an engineer may have inherited a number of biological traits that made engineering difficult for her. Let’s say that maybe, for genetic reasons, she lacked the ability to focus or was not able to understand abstract mathematical concepts. She might rationalize her idea to become an artist as a product of free will, but is it really? If she failed for biological reasons and was drawn to art as an alternative for social conditioning reasons, can we really call that “free will”?
I think the idea of free will is something humans came up with to describe a sort of happy, healthy balance. We are all essentially programmed, like a computer, by various biological and social factors, all interacting with each other. But we recognize it as unhealthy if someone has one overwhelming biological urge that controls everything they do, or if there is one social institution that has such a hegemony on society that they are the sole programmer of a person. “Free will” describes a happy state of balance between the various programming inputs on a human, so that no one factor sticks out, and all the background input sort of blends together into what you might consider your personality or identity. “Choice” is just a process of weighing all the different social and biological factors that might be influencing you at the moment. To the person who is in this state of happy balance, it feels like they are making a choice independent of all outside influence, because there is no one outside influence so overwhelming that it can be noticed among all the others. The outside influence is multifaceted, subtle, maybe even counter-intuitive, but it is there.
Because, ultimately, it’s difficult to see how we can reconcile the traditional idea of free will with what we know about the universe. We’re hardly masters of all knowledge, and there’s a lot we don’t know. But if traditional free will exists, that means certain arrangements of matter (that is, me and you) have the ability to act in defiance of all outside influence, which is a little like saying a rock can suddenly decide to stop obeying the laws of gravity. There’s a lot we don’t know about consciousness, but nothing about it suggests that we have the power to defy physics. If the universe is as mechanical as it seems to be, every action is predetermined, although it may never be possible to factor in all the preceding actions that influence the current action.Unless there is something about human consciousness that transforms entirely deterministic matter into something non-deterministic, which would be a very impressive trick.
Still, it seems very strange in some ways. When I go to pick out a book, it doesn’t feel like I’m making a predetermined choice. It feels like it’s very up in the air, like the idea is mine alone. Sometimes, maybe, I can point to biological or social factors behind my choice, but very often I can’t. It feels like the action is entirely mine, not something predetermined. I don’t ever go around saying “Well, all my actions are entirely the product of all preceding inputs”, everything feels like my choice. I might recognize that free will seems unlikely in the abstract, but I am unable to act as if I truly believe it doesn’t exist. It seems like something very innately tied to our sense of identity leans heavily on the idea of free will. Which makes sense; without it, we’d be force to admit that all our actions are pretty much just an extension of the rest of the universe. But it still seems very odd that certain bits of matter in a deterministic universe would eventually arrange itself in such a way that it would be capable of claiming that collectively, it was now non-deterministic.
cultoftheegg 