This is the first, and maybe the last, of many posts about this vexed and vexing topic. I have read and thought about it so often and so intensely that I really need to share my ideas. Sadly, they are neither original nor absurd. Unless (and this is likely, actually) I have misinterpreted what I’ve read badly enough to make nonsensical claims. Well, if I have, then perhaps I had no choice. I was determined from the origin of the universe to make these mistakes. The belief that I might have done otherwise may be an illusion.
I’ll begin with full disclosure: my two favorite philosophers, William James and Henri Bergson (who quite admired each other) both speak up for free will. James, in his essay about the judgment of regret (my essay on which in philosophy class, scribbled at the very last minute, made Fr Moeller at University of Detroit ask me to become a priest), argues that only an insane universe would predetermine its creatures to necessarily feel regret about acts which they had been predetermined to necessarily do. Bergson thinks that originality and freedom are absolutely fundamental to what make us human. Neither argues absolutely persuasively, but I think they’re both right. However, I would consider myself not a libertarian (on this question – don’t get this confused with people who don’t like national parks!) but rather what many philosophers call a “compatibilist.”
I’ll start (different from beginning, I guess) with an anecdote.
I was a peculiar child. I was smart and quiet, and I lived mostly an internal life. My thoughts were my best friends, and what happened amongst them and me constituted the real events of my life. I was barely aware of my surroundings at times.
I wanted to know how things worked, and why they worked, and what the truth was, and how we knew. In single digits age-wise, this was a recipe for trouble. I often asked questions that I wasn’t ready for the answers to, or read books far above my station. Here’s a bizarre example:
I learned at a very young age that objects never really touch each other. It turns out that all matter is composed of atoms, and that the vast majority of the mass – virtually all of it – is contained in the nucleus (composed of protons and neutrons.) Surrounding the nucleus is a cloud of negatively charged electrons. Like charges repel, and this cloud creates a force field that repels other atoms, if they get close enough.
So, what we experience as “touch” – when you press your finger on the table – is actually the interaction of force fields. The nuclei of atoms NEVER touch (except when BOOM events are desired) and even the almost immaterial electrons don’t either.
What was the result of my learning this?
I cried.
I really did. Because, you see, my mother’s lips had never touched my cheek. I had never felt the pages of my beloved books. All things were sundered from each other irrevocably in a cold, cruel world of non-touch.
For years this bothered me. It was only when I was older that I was able to resolve this problem.
IT wasn’t, you see, that touch had existed as a wonderful thing, then been reft away. “Touch” had simply never been what I thought it was. Often, we mistake our intuitive notions of definitions for what those words “actually” mean, as if there were some root, basic meaning open to intuition. I had imagined that “touch” meant “zero distance between the matter in objects.”
But this never happens in nature (maybe in the heart of the Sun, but not your backyard.) What I called touch, and all that it meant to me, has ALWAYS been “electronic field repulsion.”
I think the same is true of “free will.” Those who deny that it exists, I think are denying the reality of what they and others have always believed or characterized it as being. But, I think it never was that.
I will expand on this in “Free Will – Two” (if I ever write it) but here’s a hint: if free will means that I might have done things differently than I did them under identical conditions, then this must mean my choices are not caused by anything at all. Because, if my choices are caused by anything, then those causes are part of the “identical circumstances.” So, this idea of free will – the most common one, I think – describes something that CANNOT exist, or, if it does, would render the whole idea of free will meaningless. (If you really want a candy bar, and so you reach for one – your desire “causing” your action – and then with no cause whatsoever inside or outside yourself, you pull back, this is not free will, it’s a stroke.)