Free Will

Do we have free will or do we not? That’s the question.

Is everything determined (or predetermined for that matter?), or is everything random and chaotic?

As humanity’s knowledge of science increases, it would seem that everything can be explained in terms of cause and effect. Yet it can’t.

Who knows what will happen tomorrow or next year. Everything happens for a reason, it’s said, yet each second, each minute, each day is unquantifiable and irreducible despite how hard we try to quantity it to a clear cut formula.

First off, what is free will? It’s the conscious ability to make choices/decisions that are not produced involuntarily. Consciousness allows us to will a certain thought or idea into action (i.e. behavior)–manifesting itself into reality.

It’s not forced, not a reflex or an unconscious mechanical behavior like breathing or digestion, but an action that is deliberate and chosen against a wide array of possibilities such as what to buy, what to read, and what occupation to take up out of thousands, etc.

We understand science in terms of cause and effect–that y will happen if x occurs before it. When using this analogy for, say, machines and computers, the outcome is straightforward, predictable.

But humans are not the same as machines, though comparisons might be made for how the brain works or how the internal organs function. Free will is a lot more complex than that. It has to do with moral and existential questions: why we make certain choices, what is the value a choice, and why we have particular preferences and likes and dislikes across all areas of life.

If everything can be reduced to a simple formula, free will would be an illusion in which our choices are merely effects of unconscious (or mechanical) causes. But if this were the case, why couldn’t we manipulate and modify those causes to produce specific behaviors? But wouldn’t that be a choice? By tinkering with the mechanism that causes our choices, isn’t that resetting the whole system?

If our choices aren’t really choices, that would mean a pre-established system (or systems) determines our choices. But what would happen if that pre-established system were modified or removed? Wouldn’t our choices be random or at the command of someone else or a larger system, who is in turn, making choices for us?

If free will doesn’t exist, then wouldn’t that mean we would all be alike? Every choice and decision we made would be indistinguishable from everyone else’s. All our choices would merely be a set of reflexes and automatic behaviors like the gears and belts of an engine.

But the nuances and processes that go into our conscious decisions cannot be formulated into a rigid set of rules (people do make mistakes, right, because of their imperfections?). It’s based on experience, logic, feelings, intuition, etc., all of which coalesce into our decision-making.

If two siblings grow up in the same environment, in the same household, and go to the same school, etc., will the outcome necessarily be the same for both of them? Will they enjoy the same movies, the same books, the same food, and think exactly alike?

If everything is reducible to cause and effect, then why aren’t the aforementioned siblings exactly alike? Where’s the proof that they have no free will, that their actions are just reflexes of unconscious causes?

Even if we collected all the phenomena available about a specific individual, it wouldn’t be enough to explain every single thought or choice they made. Didn’t that individual make up their own mind about things, whether it be about their lifestyle or career choice? They decided on how they wanted to live, regardless of who told them otherwise, right?

It’s not in the purvey of science to understand individuals as if they are a collection of data on a spreadsheet. Instead, each individual lives a unique experience. Free will is intertwined with being.