Memories of the 28th Century
Illusion of Free Will
by , 01-22-2017 at 05:46 PM (1833 Views)
The concept that humans are able to freely make decisions and act upon them is quite common, and it appears to have existed for many thousands of years, at least. On the surface it often appears that people are making their own decisions, and so on, but on a deeper level, human activities probably are controlled by events and causes that are outside the control of those persons.
A strong argument can be made that everything that happens is the result of earlier causes; although it is often difficult or impossible to determine what the specific cause was, but part of that problem is because the causes are usually compounds of several reasons.
Here are links to three articles on Cause and Effect, the third one may the most informative.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/hume-cau/
http://www.ihpusa.org/causeandeffect
http://www.commonsensescience.org/pd..._causality.pdf
The Common Sense Science article also puts forth the idea that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is simply a matter of not having complete data, and if we had complete data it would be clear what the cause(s) of Quantum interactions were, even though they are considered random, unpredictable, events at the present time.
Science is, and has been, based on cause and effect at least as far back as Galileo; before that there were attacks from Atomists who had other ideas. In the centuries since then scientific thinking has become more involved in how the world operates.
More recently, there have been attacks on cause and effect by some people backing Quantum Theory. The idea that there is randomness in Quantum Theory bothered me until I realized that there are events that appear to be random, because we do not have instruments that provide sufficient resolution for us to watch what is going on inside the nuclei of atoms, but I believe that someday such instruments will be devised, and we will be able to watch the events that lead to a nucleus emitting a particle or beam of energy.
One the macro scale the problem is that we have too much information, and it is impossible to untangle the webs of chains of cause and effect such that we can tell which causes lead to which results. As it is, we can tell what the main influence was, and sometimes we can determine some of the minor contributory causes were, but to determine what causes had what percentage of the cause of a given result is beyond what we can determine, but that doesn’t undermine the concept.
Then there is the question of what part of the brain is making decisions and do we have control over that. The available indicates that the subconscious mind makes the decisions, and it usually does a good job. https://www.relationshipscoach.co.uk...isions-for-us/ In many ways the situation is analogous to a personal computer running an Operating System (OS) that has a Graphical User Interface (GUI), as Windows had through Windows 98. Users would use the GUI to make changes to settings, etc. and the changes would go into the OS, but we would only see the GUI, unless we felt like opening DOS, which was the underlying Operating System. For nearly all purposes the GUI was the Operating System, because that was where users would make their changes. And there were background programs running that didn’t appear in the GUI, so the computer was doing all sorts of things without the user knowing. Similarly, the subconscious does all sorts of things in the background from regulating blood pressure to digesting food without the conscious mind being involved at all.
While all those things are going on in the background, the conscious mind still thinks that it is running things. Even if we did have free will, we wouldn't need it, because the subconscious would be making the decisions and running without out awareness.
Then there is the underlying programming that determines a large part of what people do. Most of that is genetic, but we can't be sure, because this is something that goes on without our conscious awareness. In addition, parental direction and other early (and late) experiences also lead to later activities, but we can't tell whether these are also results of genetic programming; although they don't appear to be. And we are also influenced by society. When we toss everything into the pot there is quite a mess that gets stirred together, and all of it may be causes for events in our lives; causes over which we had no direction or control. And most of these are things that might prevent us from acting by our unrestricted free will, if we had free will.
Even if we want to believe that we have free will, the matters of decisions being made other than by the conscious mind and the chain of cause and effect that would have preceded our decision pretty much destroys any chance that we actually exercise free will. It also brings into question punishments for criminal acts, unless the Ancient Greeks were right and the eternal soul would be learning, even if the brain wasn't.
Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned the soul at all, but I did, so I should cover that also. Depending on which concept of soul one has it may allow for free will to operate in some ways, or it may be another source of background programming that eliminates to possibility of free will. The traditional concept of the soul as a thing that contains the spiritual aspects of consciousness makes it part of what prevents us from having free will, and the matter of souls drinking from the River Lethe before being assigned to a new incarnation suggests that the soul may simply be a matter of observing a life. To the best of my knowledge, there is no objective evidence for the existence of souls; although there is a large amount of subjective evidence for their existence, so this may not be a relevant matter.
On a personal basis, I used to believe that free will was possible, but the chain of cause and effect acting on everything made me change my mind. I would like to think that decisions that I make are effective, not just passing fancies. This is just an outline of the issues involved in free will; there are more complete discussions of it online, but most people don't need to go into the details. It seems that people want to have free will, but they seldom understand what it entails. It appears to me that the subconscious makes it appear that the conscious mind is in the driver's seat, but that is not the way it is. It makes for interesting things to think about.
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