Free Will - To be or not to be?

The question has been legitimately posed: Does free will exist? Is there really any such thing as choice or do we only act in certain ways due to the structure of our genes and the events that have happened to us over the course of our lives? To put it simply: Did I really choose to eat a bagel and cream cheese for breakfast this morning or did I eat that bagel and cream cheese because my past experiences and heredity made me do it?

In some ways the determinist position (positing no free will) has a lot of support. The whole of the material world seems to operate on the basis of cause and effect. (As a side note for those who have read my discussion on Hume and Cause and Effect - I will here assume that cause and effect does truly exist. Hume's contention was about the a priori necessity of the phenomenon, not the existence of it.) What caused the cup of coffee to fall on the floor? I dropped my hat, which knocked over my pen holder, which in turn knocked over my cup of coffee, which then fell to the floor. The line of cause and effect can be (theoretically) traced back to the beginning in an incredibly complex network of cause and effect. The only part of the line of cause and effect which poses the slightest problem is me. Why did I drop my hat?

The determinist position is that the forces that are at work in me as a human being are actually the same sort of mechanical forces that we observe at play in the world of matter, just working at a higher level of complexity. I dropped my hat because I was not holding it tightly enough. I wasn't holding it tightly enough because my mother once yelled at me for wrinkling her hat and my mother yelled because she was also the victim of this chain of cause and effect. One of the obvious things that happens when we adopt this position is that all our talk of right and wrong and fair play goes right out the window. It makes no sense to blame someone for torturing and murdering if they were bound to do it with no choice. We might kill them, because of our own cause and effect chain, but we couldn't with honesty blame them for it any more than we could blame the cup for falling when my pen holder hit it. This does not disprove determinism in any way (unless you hold morality to be real) but it does demonstrate that it, or a great deal of human behavior at least, is rather odd. You see, we all act as if the torturing murder did actually have a choice in the matter and made the wrong one.

Here we get into some pretty deep water because the determinist position says that what we have is the illusion of free will but that in actuality this is also just part of our upbringing and our heredity. In short, the illusion of free will is something we are taught to have. Now Occam’s razor has a couple of things to say about this argument, but as a reasoning tool the razor is certainly not always correct so we will let the argument stand for now.

Here we have an apparently logically consistent position. However, there is another side of the argument which says that there is indeed such a thing as free will and that it is demonstrated a thousand times a day in our every little choice. Will you have the wheat or the white? Will you shake his hand or slap him in the face? This argument is that the evidence of our lives is sufficient proof that there is such a thing as free will. Clearly one position must be correct and the other incorrect.

The key to this little puzzle lies in the nature of consciousness. The whole determinist argument functions on the assumption that we are essentially the same as all other matter in the universe. This, however, is untrue. There is a fundamental difference between a Human Being and a rock and that is that one is conscious and the other is not. Consciousness cannot be an illusion, as Descartes demonstrated (I think therefore I am). Clearly the rock cannot have a choice as to what is happening; it is not even aware that anything is happening at all. Before one can make a choice, they must be aware that there is such a thing as choice. On the other hand, Human Beings are aware that there is such a thing as choice. We have the potential to choose. Treating a Human Being as if he were simply matter is only dealing with part of the whole Human and it is the other part that actually possesses free will.

Of course this is not to say that we are not limited by our heredity and upbringing. These do set the stage and make us more likely to do or even to think certain things. However, the actual decisions that are made are made by the conscious individual. The murder may have been more likely to become what he became because of a horrible childhood but he still chose to commit the crime. If you abdicate your free will, which you can try to do, you are also abdicating your consciousness and all that makes you a rational human being. This is a very dangerous line because the more aware we are of our own free will the greater our ability to use it becomes.