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Do we really have free will? Free will vs Determinism


 Is free will an illusion? 

This is a question that boggles the minds of lots of people including myself, well what is life without questions? I mean these are one of  the things that makes life meaningful so without further ado I will delve into the contents. But first of all, let's talk about determinism 

 

Determinism according to the oxford dictionary means that "the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes regarded as external to the will. Some philosophers have taken determinism to imply that individual human beings have no free will and cannot be held morally responsible for their actions".Determinism is a belief in the inevitability of causation. Everything that happens is the only possible thing that could happen. The chains and networks of causes are so powerful and inexorable that every outcome is inevitable. We are already locked in to everything else that is going to happen in the entire future of the universe. If you knew all the causal principles and had enough information about the present, you could predict the future with 100% accuracy. The universe resembles a giant machine, grinding alone exactly as it must inevitably continue to do, following rigid rules. 

     Well maybe determinism is true and free will is just an illusion 😳, maybe that's what our brain wants us to believe which makes it more weird because we actually think before we act right? 

But for that statement to be correct, we need to actually think the thought before thinking it, uhn? Am as confused as you are right now.

 Well let me take for example, you wake up in the morning tired and hungry obviously, and you decide to eat oatmeal, well you could argue that it was your decision to eat oatmeal and that you thought about it randomly, but did you really? Let's see..

    Let's take into consideration these two things

Event causation and Agent causation..


    Event causation means that no physical event can occur without having been caused by a previous physical event so many libertarians concede that the physical world itself is deterministic like a football is flying through the air because someone kicked it or rain falls from the sky because of evaporation and condensation.

   Agent causation means that an agent - a being propelled by a mind - can start a whole chain of causality that wasn't caused by anything else so the person who kicked the ball most likely did so because he just decided to do it. So this notion implies that an agent has the ability to affect the causal chain of the universe and they can make stuff happen on their own, well many philosophers find this idea unattainable like where would these free decisions - the ones that launch entirely new causal chains come from? well if you can find any argument that points to this fact you have just reinforced that action is caused and not free, well the best argument is that it just feels an awful lot like we are free.


  18th century French philosopher Baron D'holbach said that none of our actions are actually free, D'holbach believes that everything that's happening now is as a result of an unbroken chain of events. Everything he said ( is the inevitable result of what came before, including everything that we do.) This means that humans and actions are just part of the physical world bound by its physical laws. This view is mostly explained by reductionism


  Reductionism: the view that all part of the world and our own experience can be traced back - or reduced to one singular thing. So for example you see your mind as being capable of making free decisions, that what goes on in your head when you make a choice is nothing like bats and balls.

  Well mental states = brain states = biological states and biological states are physical states and physical states as we say is deterministic, there is just no room for free will.

  But if I didn't decide to eat oatmeal this morning, why does it feel like I did? Libertarians say that the difference between the causes of human action and physical events like a bat hitting a ball is that our actions have all sorts of invisible causes that happen in our brains. 


 So as they say,  belief + desire + temperament = actions. The belief that oat meal is nutritious, the desire for healthy nourishment and the temperament to enjoy warm and carb comfort foods. You might argue that this belief, desire, temperament may lead to other options like maybe corn flakes but if you think deep enough, you will see that there are several factors that ruled out this option..

   So we are back to my initial statement that for free will to exist, we have to think our thoughts before actually thinking it 😎 drops mic.


  So can we now conclude that free will is indeed an illusion, and we are just living in a predetermined world... 


                      Image credits: Google images


  

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