On Free Will. Part 1

It was only a matter of time before this topic would come up and I’d have to write my opinion on it. I could still change my mind in the future, but as of now I’m going to side with some of my favorites including Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, and William James…to an extent. I still have some of my own opinions or perhaps they’re the same as these men and I don’t know it yet. As far I know the concept of free will first came about in Zarathustraism (a religion I’d like to talk about another day). The concept seems to have come about based on the ability to defy the laws of determinism. Determinism is the idea that all events of past and present, plus the laws of nature decide the future. In this perspective we don’t decide the future at all. Whether we’re coming from a deist or atheistic perspective on determinism the outcome is the same. If god was the first cause who then became indifferent to us and all effects came from all causes preceding then the world is already going in a direction we don’t choose. If god isn’t indifferent and made our bodies, and the genes that give us desires then god controls our minds too, because this is part of our genes and bodies. If god is all-omnipotent, all-omniscient, and-benevolent then god already made the future for us and all is determined. However if god is all-benevolent then why would he allow us to be sad and suffer or let evil exist? Either god is indifferent or isn’t truly all-omnipotent. I’m going with the idea that if there is god then god is indifferent. Even from an atheist perspective regardless of where things began doesn’t matter as much as once there was a cause there are a series of effects and causes that continually follow. There are genetic determinisms and social determinisms. In either case once again we don’t have control over the genes or the environments we grow up in, and once we’ve internalized certain values a chain reaction is already set off causing us to work off of what already exists and limiting possible outcomes. The idea behind free will being capable was that all matter had to abide by the laws the of nature, and it was also determined by the laws of nature meaning it was probabilistic to us who don’t have control over nature. If we push a rock down a hill it’s probabilistic where it will bounce on the hill on its way down and where it will land. Each spot the rock hits is another cause leading to another effect in the direction it bounces. Free will came about because we must have souls that are immaterial and don’t apply to the laws of nature or matter, and therefore these souls can decide to do as they like and move our bodies as we please despite nature. I’m not going to touch the idea of god or the soul and pretend that god is indifferent and the soul can’t do this.

As a true compatibalist I’d go as far as saying that there is no free will when coerced by the will of others. If this was the case then I can choose to live as I please till my will comes into conflict with the will of another person who desires otherwise. I could for instance stop writing this page right now if I so desired, because my will allows me to, but if someone had a gun to my head to keep writing my will would be coerced by another will. An incompatibalist would either assume there is no determinism or free will (hard compatibalism) or that there is no determinism and is only free will (more existential). The latter is the idea that our will creates the causes that allow us to affect the world as we please and we can create our futures. The former of the two claims we are completely reliant on determinism. So, compatibalism is congruent with determinism in that we do have to exist based on past, present, and the laws of nature, and at the other end is we don’t have to rely on any of that stuff. It’s hard for me to be a complete compatibalist, but I lean more this direction between this concept and the hard compatibalism of no free will. The reason is because of what I would call layers of consciousness. The empiricist in me would go as far as saying that what we didn’t experience through the material world could not be a thought. If someone told us about heaven and described what it looked like we could only picture the things they said in relation to things we’ve already seen. If we were blind it would be based on what we think those things would feel like compared to things we’ve felt. The other element of social construction would be how we emotionally perceived those physical experiences. Since there are so many variables going on we will each experience what we see in the material world differently, even if we’re all in the same place at the same time. So, on one hand we relate what we see to other things we’ve seen before, and on the other hand we relate emotionally to a new experience based on a past experience that has relations to the present one (many times subconsciously). This is how cause and effect work on a subconscious level. The combination of all perceptions of the past, both physical and emotional, socially construct our outlook on the present and the future. The emotional construction is aroused both by genetic emotions such as fight and flight based on pleasure and pain, and also language and the meaning of things to us that cause symbolic fight or flight in the form of emotional reactions to our understanding of words and phrases projected at us creating pleasure and pain. So, the emotional is the combination of nature/nurture determinism combined. Two different people could react to the same verbal phrase differently based on past experiences with other people who may have said the same things. On one hand a person may have said something similar to someone that we enjoyed the company of that wouldn’t bother us at all, and on the other hand the same thing could be said to another person who had a past experience with someone abusive causing this to trigger fight or flight toward the person speaking. This is why I say broken people can create more broken people and cause us to have an emotionally broken society. If we continue to act out experiences that don’t create stability and others see this that came from fairly unstable backgrounds as well, they’re more likely to repeat our treatment of them or run from what could be a stable situation in the future.

The reason a movie, book, or story can touch us isn’t because we suddenly feel something new we hadn’t before, but because what is being said relates to something we already related to through a personal experience in real life consciously and in many cases it arouses unconscious emotions relating to it. My example is I grew up in a church community that taught Christian morals and I had emotional attachments and experiences with these people. When I would turn on a cartoon like GI Joe I’d relate to the story strongly because there were blunt dichotomies of good and evil and I wanted to be a good guy. Now the combination of these morals and stories construct an even deeper picture what a good guy looks like as well as how to act, so when I would see Arnold Schwarzenegger as a hero in movies and a bodybuilder I wanted to body build, because Arnold seemed like a good guy that was built like a GI Joe and I wanted to build my body to be like that of a good guy, but it all started with the personal experience in a church where I was taught the definitions of good and evil and acted them out in personal situations with real people in my life. On top of this the stories told by people we know are that this is attractive physically, and at a later point in my life it was my fear of having to fight that I built myself to be a fighter out of low self esteem and insecurity in my environment, but the habit was always good to me despite changing environments, because I internalized the value on so many levels. The point being made here is I put that construction together consciously as I was writing this. I never realized it till this very moment, and the fact my fingers are moving on the keys shows another form of unconscious behavior. If I were to keep track of every key’s letter as I typed it I wouldn’t be able to type anymore than a carpenter who would stop to examine the nail, hammer, or wood individually wouldn’t be able to hammer the nail into the wood. These things can only all happen at once on an unconscious level. These things are only possible because we develop habits based on past conscious events and constructions. Once we develop a capacity consciously it then becomes unconscious when it is mastered. The more variables that are taking place at a given time the more unconscious our behavior is. When a circumstance comes down to something with very few variables or we manage to eliminate all the variables we don’t think matter, this is the small window of consciousness we have the ability to manipulate at a given time.

I guess I drew what appears to be a fairly pessimistic picture due to the fact that we are emotional creatures who only focus consciously on something that arouses our emotions at a particular moment. Everything else seems to be deterministic in our lives. Nietzsche tried to claim that good and evil were made up and so was morality. I disagree with this because even though the words good and evil didn’t always exist, there we elements created by nature that gave us a sense of “we” with those we belonged to as a community and this defined our morals. Everyone who wasn’t “we” was “they” of some kind and we were either indifferent to these people’s moral practices or declared them enemies and practiced the opposite of them. It was only a matter of time before a religion came around that people created an allegory of this scenario that was being lived out for so many centuries. Since all past and present creates the future and we’re trapped in the middle of this, the only thing that could possibly save us from where we are at a point in time would be a story that relates to someone that had a more positive past experience growing up enough that it would encourage them to tie themselves to the values in the story and eventually move to a place where the structure is different around them. We don’t change a habit completely till we change people, places, and things, and we have to start with places that we believe will have people doing things different than our present situation. Most arguments on choices come down to blaming the individual versus blaming the structure the individual exists in. If you live in the area of LA that has the most fast food chains you’ll find the most obese people in LA. The structure plays a crucial role in how people turn out. The only thing that might change someone’s desire to eat at these places is their emotional tie to someone who doesn’t value eating fast food, and tells a story about why this is no good. If not this then there would be an experience similar to my own where you want to be a good guy and a good guy values having a strong body that looks healthy. Aristotle was right in my eyes when he said that we have to teach children the right habits, because when we teach them these things that they have to acknowledge consciously in youth by those they care about, these habits are causes that will create all effects later in life when internalized on the subconscious level. We will always have some broken people, but they won’t cause as permanent of damage on our children if our children are already in a habit of distinguishing from what they’ve internalized compared to what another does to them as valuable and right. I suppose this is a method of causal determinism put in an ecological scenario. People who will make the claim that we can use our abstract thinking abilities to make better choices about the future are only right insofar as they’ll plan the future based on what they’ve already internalized as valuable at another stage in life consciously through someone they cared about and wanted to be like. That little window in consciousness only comes about when it symbolically agrees with or defies something we’ve strongly internalized on an emotional level through a confrontation. When what we care about is challenged in a way that is hard for us to refute we may just change our minds about things at the conscious level once again before internalizing it different at another subconscious level. These internalized unconscious values change when those we care about change. If a liberal moved to a small town of all conservatives and had no connections to anyone they left behind, and they also managed to assimilate into this small town and develop new emotional ties, they’d eventually change the way they felt about crucial issues through a series of symbolic tug of wars till they caved their ideology into something else or fled the town. Only someone with no friends could maintain the same values over a lifetime, and this person would eventually go insane from no human interaction.