Maybe this has come up before, but I still wanted to ask. Lately, I’ve been a bit confused about whether we really have free will or not. I’m not religious and I don’t really believe in metaphysics. I’d probably call myself agnostic. I’ve just been questioning life more than I used to, and this thought keeps popping into my head.
Do we actually have free will? Like, can we really choose things the way religious texts say we can? What made me think about this is how predictable the micro world seems to be—but when you go deeper into the quantum level, things get really chaotic and complex.
On top of that, as people, we’re constantly shaped by what we go through, and it feels like our reactions and choices get more limited over time.
What do you think about all this?
I’ve never really understood any argument for free will, because I’ve never really understood exactly what they mean by ‘free will’. Take me through it, exactly what does it mean if you ‘make a choice’?
I suspect we don’t know enough about the mechanics of consciousness yet to determine what free will really means. We certainly know enough about psychology to understand predispositions to make certain choices and humans as a group are fairly predictable.
If you can’t define the thing you’re arguing for, then I don’t think you can really reasonably claim that it exists.
As free will, we can handle any choice you make. At least that’s what I mean. Everything you choose in life, whether you brush your teeth this morning, whether you drink tea or coffee. More broadly, your ideologies, your reactions in life, whether you choose to be a “bad person” as a result of bad experiences. The holy books say we can choose these things. That we can determine our destiny by these decisions and that it is up to us to choose between heaven or hell. I think this is wrong and I wanted to ask you all my opinion. There will always be certain criteria and certain limits when we make choices. But what I am curious about is the predictability of our choices.
Ok, let’s take one example. You said you can choose whether you brush your teeth this morning or not.
If you do choose to brush your teeth, what caused you to do so?
That’s exactly what I’m trying to ask, what caused this? Was it already prepared and foreseeable? Or did I just want to brush my teeth. I think we humans don’t live in a cause-and-effect relationship and so I think it’s difficult to give a clear answer to that question. Maybe if I could come up with a rationalization, it would be: I need to be clean, for the health of my teeth, to keep up the routine, etc.
Why can’t it be that it happened because you wanted to brush your teeth, and the reason you wanted to was deterministic?
I’m asking how we want it. I’m asking what kind of causality the brain uses to want it. It’s very difficult to explain what’s in my mind. Let’s take earthquakes for example, earthquakes don’t just shake the earth as they please, right? There are certain continental movements, land plates form, these plates move with certain underground movements and we shake because of the friction, movement, cracks and pressure. Take the winds on Earth, the wind doesn’t just blow wherever it wants to, certain pressures, landforms, antecedent and successor winds, things like that allow winds to happen where and when they want to happen. Before we humans knew about these mechanics of earthquakes and winds we thought they were random, but thanks to science we have mapped them and now with our current knowledge we can at least make high-powered predictions. And if you are not a religious person, you are more likely to think that the “life” of us humans and other living beings is not something that was created in such a monumental way. It is, in essence, a complex structure of energy cycles in which inanimate beings live with each other in a given ecosystem. And human beings have a lot of mechanics. There are many details that affect our will. It’s not random and we can’t decide anything. Can we be predictable beings with a lot of mechanics like emotions, thoughts, certain movements of atoms and molecules inside us, the society and the world we live in?
Detaching it from science and what’s actually going on inside our brains, I see two logical possibilities for why something happens. Either it was the result of a deterministic prior cause, or it was random. Neither of those are ‘you choosing’ for it to happen.
Yes. I was just looking for that kind of answer. My poor English might made it become waste of time but thanks for sharing opinion.
All those things are cultural. Humans are social creatures that mimic other humans to form a kinship. Whether you drink tea because that is what British people do, that is cultural. You put a human baby with a chimpanzee, they will mimic the chimpanzee. Feral children raised by dogs mimic the dogs they grew up with. Christianity does not indefinitely say we have free will. It is a debate, not a consensus. Calvinism sides with predestination as an example. The Qur’an is very heavy on predestination - a holy book to Muslims which is steeped in Judeo-Christian tradition.
Good and evil, or good versus evil is dualism that Judeo-Christian tradition inherited from the Persians when Jews were ruled by the Persians. Again, it is a cultural concept that is not universal, but contingent on what is taught generationally, and taken for granted as being a truth. The fact you take dualism seriously, shows that you are influenced by cultural assumptions made up, and passed up to the present day by distinct cultures. In reality, there is no good versus evil, or good or evil in a universal, absolute sense.
I understand what you mean, but rather than culture and phenomenon, I’m curious about the limits of our will. For example, except in the case of dogs or chimpanzees, would two identical children, living exactly the same life (same life, same food, same family, same traumas, same friends, same events, and even all the little reactions and actions that we don’t define as events) make the same decisions? Would they do the same things every day, at the same time, at the same second? Or would we still see a difference? Could one be good and one bad? Would one listen to a different band?