On Free Will. Part 2

The laws of physics dictate that every effect has a cause, and if every effect has a cause then how do we know our will is really a choice of our will or a choice of necessity? The idea that I can choose or not choose to eat a cheeseburger would be seen as my free will. I can’t control my natural desire of hunger, but people would believe I was making a choice to not eat the cheeseburger. Why would I not choose to eat the cheeseburger? This is my argument against free will, and the reason is because the effect of my choosing not to do something doesn’t necessarily mean it was a conscious desire that was driving what I had as a conscious desire to eat something or not. If I’m hungry I should eat, but the choice not to comes from another desire or desires, which could be a number of variables. I might value not gaining weight, my arteries, animal abuse, or may even have an emotional disposition against the person offering it to me. A person who has created a habit of not eating the cheeseburger could have any or all of these and deny it without thinking twice. When pressured to answer why they won’t eat by someone else they’ll likely force one of their subconscious desires to the surface for debate. The more reasons we can consciously give for a decision in our lives at certain points, the more subconscious reinforcements we have for acting on them as we do, and the more variables involved in a choice to do or not do something, the more unconscious the decision becomes to make a choice in this direction.

This is my dispute with compatibalism or the Hobbesian view of soft determinism that leaves room for some free will. Where does that will come from to begin with? The Hobbesian idea is that we have free will insofar as is doesn’t come into conflict with the will of others, but the will of others may be just as unconscious as our own wills to do something. Back to the cheeseburger we’ll see that my choice not to eat it was driven by numerous subconscious wills that I learned to value and internalize, and these are the wills that are truly driving my desires more than others. Where do these desires come from? Desires are extensions of beliefs and values, and beliefs and values are extensions of emotional incidents we experienced consciously at points in real life with people we cared about or hated. From the time we’re young we are building the foundation of a house under the influence of our environments. When the basic frame is set in place we come into contact with new people throughout our lives. The basic frame is made up of values we learned from people we cared about, which are most likely family and peers. If the value and belief gained from these people is that we should try to be with the person we love for life, we’ll try and do everything we can to keep a person in our lives once we develop emotions for them. This is why people may come across as irrational sometimes. On one hand we might see that someone keeps calling and chasing another person down to show them how much they love them and the other person isn’t responding. There are two likely reasons they aren’t responding. One is that they grew up in a home that doesn’t value the things we were taught to like staying with the one we love for life, and the other could be they just don’t have emotions for us anymore. Maybe they never did, but then why did they start talking to us in the first place? The one thing we all have in common seems to be that we want validation of some kind for our existence, and the only place we seem to get this is by hearing the echo of ourselves off of others. When I say I love you, it isn’t to let you hear it as much as it’s to hear it back and that makes me feel like I matter. The reason someone shows an interest in us is because they have a different story than we do. All the cells in an organ are driven by self desire, but they all value the organ, and won’t work against each other because they don’t want the organ to collapse. The story they all learn to tell is about how important the organ is.

Where does the story come from? Glad you asked (lol)! The story once again comes from people we learn to gain emotions for in our lives. If we love them we want to be more like them and will find reasons to combine their story to our already existing story. If my house only has a basic frame of values and beliefs and you move into my life and bring some decorations with you to fill my house with, it will only be a matter of time before I forget you brought them and start to identify them with myself as my own. Once I develop an emotional bond with the new beliefs and values that seem to compliment my own I see them as representations of myself, so when you move out of my life I still hold onto them because I fell in love with them the same way I fell in love with you, and even though you’re gone I see the decorations as a part of me more than you now. This is why we’re never really the same people as we travel through life. All the causes that come into contact with us are really creating new effects. We tend to maintain the same personalities throughout life, but once values and beliefs change we change our lifestyles with the same attitude to project them in our own sui generis way. If we decide we hate someone we start to reject all the values we associate with them, or clean house in a sense. We throw out these values and beliefs because we see them as harmful and bad like the person we hate. There’s really a conglomeration of these feelings that compliment or substitute one another.

Once again we’re back to eating or not eating the cheeseburger and what we find is that our “choice” not to eat it is driven by numerous subconscious affiliations with things we learned to value as our own due to the fact that we learned to value people they came from at some point in our lives. In a sense this is an empiricist way of looking at these tendencies, because what we didn’t experience at some point in real life in some form is not a value we will hold onto. At the same time I’ve added an emotional spin to the empiricism to express the fact that we don’t all see the world the same due to our emotional perceptions of the experiences based on those we care about and care about prior and internalize the values of. Since we don’t really care about people and only care what they can do for us we have to ask what do people want from us? The only thing we all have in common is the validation factor, which is the ability to hear ourselves in others. How we want to hear ourselves in others on the other hand is socialized in the bigger picture. Just like the organ all the cells are telling the same story about how important the organ is that houses them. They all refer to themselves as cells of the organ and not just a cell. Cells without an organ don’t really have a known story in common with other cells. If we don’t come from an organ and meet someone from the same organ we have no story in common and have to make up a new one from scratch. If I was taught to value the stability of loving someone for a long term relationship and you weren’t taught anything by your parents, you’ll likely pick up these values from school and television till your peers give you an idea what to value or you have your own experiences with attempts at love. Since young people are naturally more unstable and many don’t have clear definitions of what a relationship is supposed to be about, we can say young people are in a state of anomie, because they haven’t been given any norms when it comes to how they should love another in their life. Since the age of industry people have become more individual and autonomous so we have to act out many of the things that aren’t in laws or stories from religion, which most people give up on these days through the same methods the chimpanzees use, which are reciprocity and a development of mutual empathy through interaction. This means every new relationship we encounter is another house being built from the ground up with parts from our old houses, because we aren’t all raised in the same kinds of houses anymore or even houses that teach us values others are taught. One of my arguments for religion is the fact that everyone in a church tells the same story for the most part and these people can just pull their house together to have a bigger house due to the fact they share so much cultural history, values, and beliefs. The fight and flight battles are no longer physical but symbolic and what we’re really fighting for is emotional stability by trying to keep the house we have in tact when our cultural values and beliefs are under attack. If we are outnumbered and defeated then the cause creates a new effect in our lives, which are new values and beliefs, and we become part of a new tribe or empire of people who defeated us. We all want validation due to the insecurity created by civilization, but from here we want to add to our story with the aid of another who may have fooled us and fooled themselves into thinking that we would complement their story the same as they would ours. Instead we substitute ours original virtues to construct something new that isn’t always stable, and this is why a friendship is the best stability to potentially build a house on, because we don’t want to build houses with people we haven’t seen the toolbox and supplies of yet, and that takes a long time to understand. The truth is, beyond validation we don’t know what people want from us, and this is why we can’t let ourselves be fooled into changing our stories to bring people in our lives. To be emotionally intelligent is to stand by our story that has a stable meaning, and through friendships let that story tell itself slowly instead of ripping the pages out and stapling them in new books. New people should instead be compatible enough to be the next chapter in our own books. Our stories should be built on self-bureaucratization that comes from a lager stable unit of friends with the same values, and anyone who can’t be compatible with the already existing organ is a threat to the organ if not at least our cell as a person.