Do we have freewill?
The question as to whether we have free will, the ability to independently decide how to act with out manipulation or predetermination, has been debated since ancient times, It is a simple question to ask but perhaps it is one that is too simple to be easily answered, especially as, when it comes to our actions, context is all important and is always unique.
Firstly, what is the difference between freedom and freewill? Freedom is the unhindered capacity to act as one chooses. However, the making of a choice as to how to act, is always proceeded by thought processes, so to be truly free, one will need totally free thought processes combined with total freedom of action. Therefore freewill (freedom to think) is separate from freedom (freedom to act) and free will is a precondition of freedom. My definition of freewill is “a state of mind where an individual is at liberty to think and choose how to act without, coercion, predetermination, or manipulation“. To be totally free, you also need freewill as free thinking and unhindered decision making, proceeds any truly free physical act.
So “freedom” is freedom to act and “freewill” is the freedom to choose how to act. If you don’t have free will, you will only have an illusion of freedom.
Freewill, is a subset of freedom of thought, as thought does not always lead to a chosen action. I can think about the colour red, or clouds, but this doesn’t lead to an action, so exercising my free will is not involved. Also freewill is not just a feeling, as I have read in some books. It is an unhindered state of mind that considers alternatives and decides what an individual shall do. A feeling is just an input to the brain, which may cause you to start to use your freewill in order to select an action.
Obviously, free will is a higher level of brain activity that just reacting to a stimulus.
Does a Prisoner have freewill? A prisoner is free to think what ever he wants, but is unable to act out those chosen actions - so using my definitions, he definitely has freedom of thought and therefore freedom of choice, but little freedom as he cannot act out the majority of those choices. Hence, even though he is incarcerated he has free will. If he attempts to leave the prison he will be punished, but will this stop him thinking of leaving? No, it will just discourage from him to attempting to leave in the future, but it will not stop his choice or desire to leave.
I have read of prisoners who have endured torture and who came to realise that, whilst their torturers can inflict bodily pain, they can never torture their minds. Once they realise this they are free of their captors, who can no longer harm “them”, by which they mean their thought processes. Also political prisoners have written that once in prison they feel more free, as rather than continually hiding what they think, they can freely express and discuss their views to fellow inmates, as they can’t be imprisoned twice.
Are there any constraints on our thoughts when choosing how to act? There are certainly constraints on our freedom, which may lead us to dismiss options when considering how to act, but as these options still exist in our minds, and we can consider them if we want, we still have freewill. Limited knowledge is certainly a constraint, as greater knowledge will give a person more options to consider. You cannot consider and option you do not know about.
If we don’t possess freewill, we will only have one option to consider so there is no mental selection process. Even if we only have a limited number of options, we can exercise our freewill to choose how to act. And as we can always do something or nothing, do we ever never have a choice to make as time progresses? Different people will have more or less options for consideration than ourselves, so we will all have differing levels of freewill, ie greater knowledge provides more options for consideration. For example, do I go for a walk, a bike ride, a swim or stay indoors. If I can’t swim my options to act are reduced but I am still at liberty to exercise my free will within my capabilities. I can still think about swimming, as I have seen others do it. But if I’ve never seen or heard of skate boarding, this is not an option for me.
In fact, are their any circumstances when you don’t have freedom of thought? Even when subjected to brainwashing, torture or constant propaganda, you could still have alternative thoughts inside your head, albeit it would take more effort, would need greater strength of mind and great courage to express them. Is there ever a situation where we never consider options to actions? Perhaps if we choose to live in the moment, thoughtlessly, then we would be living our lives on a stimulus/reaction basis. But humans are capable of so much more. Of course damaged brains or drugged brains will not function with free will but I will dismiss these as abnormal situations.
Biologist and neurologists will point out that we automatically flinch from pain or have automatically reflexes, and that when we are growing up certain behaviours become hardwired into our character, They imply that what we decide is predetermined - and yes this may be the case if we make instant decisions or we are lazy and don’t think about what we are doing. However, we humans can think, train our bodies and minds not to flinch, predict and anticipate the future, be creative, learn and research, plan and develop a strategy. It takes effort but perhaps that’s the point, we all have free will but we don’t have to use it - we could just do what we are told or follow what other people are doing. It takes more time, more effort but we all have the ability to use our freewill. If we choose, we do not have to be preprogrammed automata with a predetermined destiny.
Is it possible to be free to act however you like, but be unable to think of alternative actions, as you only know one way of thinking? This narrowness of mind, would imply that our lives are predetermined. For example if you where brought up educated in only one of the many religious doctrines, and where totally ignorant of the existence of others (or atheism), you will probably only be able to think and act as taught, even if you lived in a free society. If you don’t know of a different way of thinking (and are punished immediately at the first sign of doing so), it is unlikely you will think of an alternative by yourself, especially when young. However I don’t believe this is how the human mind works over a whole lifetime, as given greater experiences, reflection and time ie greater knowledge, new ideas would be constantly generated,.(by unlimited associative learning). The result of this lack of knowledge of alternative options, is that our tribal, unconnected, history means we live in a world of great variety, with widely differing cultures, religions and language. If our lives are predetermined by the laws of nature, why do we not all think and behave in the same way? The laws of physics are the same all the time, no matter where you are. Similarly, animal individual behaviour is highly predictable for each species, so if humans do not have free will, where does the all the variation in human behaviour come from? Even identical twins think differently.
A thought experiment
You are walking alone down a deserted street, and you see a £20 note on the path. What do you do?
The options are
a) Nothing, keep walking.
b) Keep walking but return later to see if its still there, then pick it up.
c) pick it up.
Assuming you pick it up other options open up to you,
1) Put it in your wallet and forget about it,
2) Try to find the person who lost it and return it
3) Show it to everyone you meet telling them how lucky you are
4) Spend it on a luxury for your self
5) Spend it on a necessity for your self
6) Buy a weapon, such as a knife and to do evil.
7) Gamble it (high risk attempt to enlarge it)
8) Invest it (low risk attempt to enlarge it)
9) Give it to the police and let them deal with it.
10) Give it to someone of higher social status,
11) Give it to someone of lower social status
12) spend it on a gift for some one else
13) Give it to charity
14) If you are reading this in the future, you might sell it to an antiques collector or donate it to a museum.
15) Ignore the monetary value and use it as a piece of paper (do I have to spell it out?).
16) Stick it to the pavement and amuse your self as you watch others try to pick it up.
17) Make a paper toy plane
18) Destroy it
19) Treat it as litter and put it in a litter bin
20) buy some bird food to help wildlife
21) Buy a tree and plant it for future others to enjoy.
22) something else that you can think of, but I can't, because your unique knowledge of the world will be different to mine.(turn it into Art?)
23) eat it
24) A combination of any of the above (ie keep £10 and give £10 away).
25) Donate to a political party
26) lend it to someone.
If this isn’t an example of freewill, then I don’t know what is! Just because we can only ever act out one of the options, and that our context means our chosen action might be highly predictable, doesn't mean we are automata.
However, now consider what you would do if you were being watched. or with a friend, you are late for a train, you are rich or poor, or did/didn’t believe in God or the Devil, you are a member of a criminal gang. Finally imagine you’re a dog and it’s a cooked sausage on the path (hence nr 23). Does the list change? Are there more or less options open to you?
If you are a dog seeing the sausage, the only option is eat it, and quick, before another dog turns up. But for humans, what ever the situation, all the options remain open, it just means you rapidly dismiss certain options as implementation is constrained but other factors. But the important point is, that the options do still exist, no matter what the context and its still up to you to exercise your free will and choose how to act.
What other evidence, if any, is there that we have free will. I can think of several examples, which I don’t think can be refuted.
a) It is a fact that humans, with our big complex brains, possess the ultimate freedom to end our lives at any time we choose. Whilst this may be a rather unpleasant thought, the means to exercise this option is always available and some ancient philosophers even ended their lives by just holding their breath. Even Socrates choose to end his life, even though he could have easily defended himself against his charges. If we didn’t have free will, this choice would not be open to us and wouldn’t even be contemplated, but unfortunately many seriously think about it and choose this option. Turning this on its head, by exercising your choice to continue living, you are proof that you have free will. Biologists will say that we are programmed by our genes to survive and reproduce and so even this choice is not of our free will. This is certainly true of animals, but is it true of humans? Do our genes over ride our brains? If so how do you explain our modern day use of contraception - doesn’t this proves the falsity of this biological determinism argument. Choosing not to have children makes no evolutionary sense.
b) We always have a choice between acting now or holding out for the longer term. When you get paid you could spend it all in one go or you could spend some of it now and save a bit for later. You could gobble up the contents of your larder, store them as fat on your body, or you can leave it uneaten for later. Humans have the ability to make a judgement of possible future outcomes and decide how to act in the present. We do not just react to stimuli in a predetermined way. This process of determining our futures by deciding how to act now, is so common it is overlooked but is an undeniable example of freewill.
c) We always have a choice between selfishness and altruistic behaviour. This depends to a certain degree on whether you can get away with it, If everyone acts selfishly, society would break down so enforcement of the law would be strict. If everyone else is altruistic, it would pay to be selfish as expensive enforcement would be slack. Hence crime will always be with us.
d) If free will doesn’t exist, what is the explanation of my and many others love of dangerous pursuits such as rock climbing or (not in my case) drug taking. These activities are satisfying and pleasant for the individual but potentially very harmful in the long run. If there was a rational natural law of explanation then every one would do dangerous things but they don’t. This behaviour certainly isn’t attractive to the opposite sex. Who wants offspring from a partner who will probably not be around very long to help raise a family?. Perhaps freewill means that individuals choose trills and trips rather than boring safety.
From these examples, I say that all humans do have freewill, but because it takes extra effort and courage to use it and act out it's results, we are usually lazy and choose not to, we just go with the flow. However, it is our responsibility to use it and not just do the easiest thing. The path of least effort is usually not the correct way to act which is why the world is in such a mess. If people deny we have freewill, they are absolving themselves of their responsibility, Just like Putin, who says Russia was forced ie had no choice, but to invade Ukraine. What Rubbish.
So, if we all have freewill, but some of us use it more than others, does this rid us of determinism? Well, at the level of the individual, it greatly reduces it, but at the scale of society no. The behaviour of a society is the emergent property of the total behaviour of all the individuals within it, and this aggregate behaviour will be highly predetermined by past events and the levels of knowledge within that society. Therefore, a democratic society will contain some who (by exercising their freewill) decide to think that rule by a single strong person is best, but the majority would choose to think that regularly voting for a leader is better, so their will will be the one most likely to be the reality. The result is that from all those individual behaviours, the behaviour of the society as a whole is predetermined ie the democratic society will be more peaceful, more egalitarian, and more free than one ruled by a dictator. Hence, at the level of an individual, there is great variability in behaviour as people use their freewill, but at the level of society or nation, a high degree of determinism as the variables are averaged out and a pattern of overall behaviour emerges. Freewill and determinism can exist at the same time, but not at the same scale.
Finally
Many philosophers say that free will is an illusion, but I’ve not been able to understand their line of thinking. The above are my thoughts on the matter and I do state that, because more options are available for consideration, greater knowledge provides a greater degree of freewill, . However, Socrates said that with greater knowledge, you can’t help but do the ‘right’ thing., so, if there is only one right or best thing to do, does that mean we have no freewill? Well no, because we still have all the options to think about in our heads, and some of us can dismiss knowledge we don't like as fake, but it does mean that we are more likely to choose the same course of action. So knowledge increases our freewill, but as knowledge increases our ability to predict the outcomes of those options, our freedom to act is constrained and more individuals will start to act in the knowledgable way with less variability in society . I would also point out that usually it is possible to act out more that one option, ie hedge your bets, or an action be started, but then changed later as the knowledge of the likely outcomes increases.
PS Tunicates, a marine animal, starts life as a swimming tadpole with a brain, but later undergoes metamorphosis, becomes an immobile filter feeder and shrinks it's brain. Also, shrews decrease the size of their brains in winter when there's less to do. Wants this got to do with humans, well nothing, but remember - use it, or lose it!!!
Part 2 An alternative systems Approach
The present moment of a person will pass into a future moment.
The action being undertaken in the present moment will pass into the action being undertaken in the future moment.
Assuming the person remains alive, the present action will become the future action because of a process.
Applying knowledge of systems, this process can only be one of the following 1) stable, or simple Ie unchanging predictability, 2) periodic ie variable but repeating predictability, 3) Random (ie totally unpredictable) 5) Chaotic ie appears unpredictable but there is an underlying pattern 5) complex. (ie very difficult to predict)
Applying the theory of evolution, we can dismiss periodic, chaotic and random when thinking about human processes. Natural selection has eliminated these forms of behaviour in animals.
Human behaviour cannot be described as stable or simple, or we would all do exactly the same thing, every day of our lives.
Therefore the process that gets a person from one moment to the next is a complex process.
When applying this complex process, a person can only arrive at one future moment and not go back.
.However because a person always has options (ie alternative realistic future actions) for consideration, the one action undertaken in that future moment is always a choice of processing, or predicting and assessing the likely outcomes of differing options ie we can exercise free will to choose between options.
Assuming that because we can only undertake one single action in any one single moment, is not evidence of predetermination of behaviour, because it ignores the complex process in which we consider alternatives. exercise our free will and decide on which option to implement.
Given perfect knowledge, a complex system could be seen as a predictable and therefore a stable predictable system. However, in reality. perfect knowledge is impossible as the information needed, and the energy needed to process that information is so large, that it is impossible in the real world. Therefore stating that a complex system such as human behaviour is deterministic, is an attractive arrogance, but is false.
Conclusion - We are not automata. .
Assuming we have no free will
You could say that all of the above is a delusion to give me comfort in thinking I have freewill.
So if we don't have free will, what could we do with this knowledge? Nothing, as we don't have free will. This information would be totally useless to us.
So we may as well not waste anymore time thinking about it, live with our delusion and get on with something more useful or pleasant.
