Bill's Comments

The third paper in this series on Free Will and Determinism is now available in Bill's Big Stuff. There will be a fourth paper on why the universe appears deterministic even though it might not be.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

As I have explored in my first attempt at this discussion, determinism can be approached from various levels, and to varying degrees of absoluteness. I explored physical, psychological, and situational determinism. However, when the issue comes up in such discussions as this one, the issue really relates to choice—“Could I have done otherwise?”—to quote from Daniel Dennett. Thus we see the entanglement of free will with determinism and their potential antithetical characters.

Having shown in the preceding papers that the problem of a deterministic universe is insoluble, we now arrive at the question of free will. In the discussions I have seen, the argument is simplified to “if the universe is deterministic there is no free will and if it is not, there is.” What I shall try to do in this paper is show that free will exists regardless of the deterministic state of the universe.

So how should we approach this issue? Do we consider free will as existing when we could have done otherwise but did not know of the other choice(s)? Or does it exist only to the degree of our ability to see the choices? In the day to day world, this is probably the most common concept of free will, though we often will later do a Homer Simpson (Say, “Doh!” And smack our foreheads.). For this discussion to even attempt to be conclusive or effective, we will adopt the definition of having a choice whether we see the choice or not. In saying we have a choice, we are saying that at the point of choice, there is no influence on the choice but our own real or potential considerations. But there is a subtlety here. We could certainly say there is free will if the choice can be made randomly, but the choices that mean something are not random.

Labels: determinism, free will, philosophy