Disclaimer:
I've found that debate of free will vs. determinism is a an extremely touchy subject, and that critique of free will is little less than abhorrent to some. Some people I've talked to about these things think it's unethical to even hold the view that free will does not exist; and naturally, some judge others' character negatively if they hold this. And I can somewhat understand this opinion—denial of free will is denial of something that is so basic to our psychology, and something that, from day to day, we rarely (if ever) doubt that we have—myself included.
However, I believe there can be some positive aspects to not believing in free will: perhaps we can come to be more understanding and more empathetic to those who have done things that we consider to be unusual or immoral. We could perhaps become more forgiving, and maybe we can learn better not to cast the first stone, as it were. This certainly doesn't extend to the legal realm, though—lack of free will is never a valid reason to not be held responsible for actions.
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Regarding free will vs. determinism, my efforts are directed toward trying to explaining why we live in a deterministic universe, and why no choice can even approach being called 'free.' Last night, however, I began to wonder what it would take—what kind of conditions would have to be in place—for us to live in what could justly be called a non-deterministic universe—to have free will, as it were. As a template for working out this thought experiment, I took an example of a choice based on physical desire. Even after just a brief rehearsal of the principles of determinism, however, it's easy to see how the question of [ ] is rendered unnecessary and illogical. But approaching it this way may illustrate the general critique of free will in a way that will be more easily acceptable/understandable to some.
We stand in front on the ice cream freezer in an ice cream store. Now, the reasons why people choose to eat ice cream can be understood fairly easily. The desire for sweetness is, evolutionarily, very old.1 Further, the basic ingredients in ice cream—milk, eggs, sugar, etc.—have been staples of societies with domesticated plants and animals for millennia. Further, the frozen or semi-frozen state of ice cream is, of course, thought to be refreshing to many. But there were, of course, constraints to our choice of ice cream this day. For example, most people don't go for ice cream in the mornings. Further, most people eat ice cream as a dessert, not a meal itself (although I'm sure many kids tried this—but even this is a very temporary thing). Then there are those who physiologically constrained, as it were: some people do not enjoy sweet foods; even more important, a large portion of the world is lactose intolerant. So we understand fairly well when and why (and whynot) we might have ended up in an ice cream store. On to the next movement:
Now perhaps we knew what flavor we wanted before we arrived. Perhaps the desire for this single flavor motivated our journey. But suppose we didn't know what we wanted beforehand; or, now that we are actually (visually) presented with the multitude of choices, we second-guess our original impulse. Let us say our attention turns to the strawberry ice cream. We see this flavor, and recall our past experiences with it. Our sensory memory of strawberry ice cream is engaged, and we undergo an extremely complex neurological/neurochemical process that allows us to “remember” the taste of strawberry ice cream. In a sense, we are actually already re-living the experience of eating the ice cream—albeit a less vivid, “lower resolution” experience.2
Let us say that, after this experience (which can transpire in a mere second), our attention now turns to the chocolate ice cream. The process repeats. We may do this over and over, for every flavor. Ultimately, a variety of desires and memories, both conscious and subconscious—the past situations that we have had these flavors of ice cream in, whether positive or negative; our physiological sensitive to the chemicals which compose ingredients of flavors, etc.—finally pushes us to that critical point where we make our selection, and go through with our payment.
We see here, in every aspect of our choice, the total influence of the chain of causality: from all our past experiences up until the present. And, of course, our own experiences themselves are predated by a longer chain of causality, back to the faintest glimmers of our emerging fetal self-consciousness; back to our conception; further back to our evolutionary ancestors; and ultimately, all the way back to the origins of the universe.
Although I focused on the choice of different flavors of ice cream, we can apply the exact same principles to why we chose ice cream instead of cake, for example, or any number of foods or desserts.
Choice is never free—free of the weight of the past. So could some miraculous, supernatural intervention break us from the weight of the past—the chain of causality? The problem for our example of ice cream here is that the only way to “break the chain” would be to erase all of our experiences with strawberry and chocolate, back even to before we saw or heard of these things for the first time. And this would leave us with no meaningful neurological reference point to make a choice by. By erasing all our past experiences with strawberry and chocolate, it would be as if—at least for those unfamiliar with Kashmiri cuisine—we were presented with a choice of Nadeir yakhean or Tsoek vangan. We would have no experience to draw on; and hence we'd probably resort to some very rudimentary, meaningless standard of decision—perhaps a vague similarity in the name of one of these to a food we are more familiar with.
1 See, for example, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2147592/
2 See Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop for some interesting discussion on this.
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