A philosophy professor stopped a young man on the street and asked, "Young man, do you believe in free will and do you live by it?"
"Yes, I do", replied the young man.
"Prove it." The professor ordered the young man, sternly.
The young man put down his gym bag, undid his shoelaces and re-tied them again. "There, it was out of free will that I did what I just did and will do again if I want to. Happy?"
The professor, touching his chin, stroking his goatee, said, "What you did was prompted by my asking you a question. In other words, I pre-determined that you were going to do something when I asked you a question. Would you have done that if I didn't? Causation, young man precedes everything we do or why events occur. Something before anything determines what comes next. Free will is an illusion! Determinism is real".
At which point the young man punched the professor on the chin, knocking him down. Lying on his back on the pavement, shocked and confused, the professor asked his assailant, "What made you do that? You'll go to prison and I'll make sure you'll never find employment anywhere".
The young man, nonchalantly declared, "I am neither criminally nor morally responsible. You predetermined my action. According to what you just said, causation preceded my action. Determinism is real, my free will was an illusion! You said so yourself".
First of all, that was just a story I made up and I am not espousing violence to drive a point. It merely exemplified, outrageously if not utterly badly, this huge debate that had gone on since the first time man started to reason. Since Adam and Eve, since Cain and Abel, if you will. Philosophers and neuro-scientists argue about it, theologians and atheists yell at each other, ordinary people discuss it over dinner or drinks, even physicists and mathematicians spend time dissecting it. I bet you are debating this in your head right now. Books, symposiums, YouTube, TED Talk have all but exhausted the subject. But it is still going on.
So, which is it? I've thought about it, as you have just now. Either free will is real, or an illusion as the professor insisted. But that can't be right, you say.
Shakespeare's most famous soliloquy, "To be or not to be", was about Hamlet's contemplation of life and death, the decision to end it all or choose life over death or whether to leave it to what fate awaits the undecided. And then it gets convoluted.
Let's take a look.
(b) Pre-destination and Free Will are mutually exclusive. It is either our lives have all been pre-determined from inception to the very end or that our free will shapes everything we do or how we will become. The future is a giant toss up.
(c) We depend on a mixture of both. For example, a few of the thousands of high school graduates, bright and in excellent physical shape, are chosen each year to enter the U.S. Military Academies. Those chosen accepted to do it, and we make an assumption that it was out of their free will. However, once in and after graduation, their lives and career are predetermined for military service for at least six years or longer. Other high school graduates who choose med school are predetermined towards the Hippocratic oath, and countless others make different choices, etc.
(d) Determinism works in the macro world while free will operates in the micro arena. Example? The fate of a nation or empire or the trajectory of a society at some point of their development could end up being predetermined in the large or macro scale. At the micro level of the individual, does one have free will? Even in a totalitarian state?
Now, you may think, and you're convinced you are allowed to do so, all of the above are hogwash, none of them even makes sense to you, and you say you have the free will to think so and that's it. Bravo! Congratulations, you were free to think and so you did. You're done thinking about it. You've forgotten about it already.
Honestly now, have you? Really? Was the professor right?
Now, you're ready to consider even more free wheeling thoughts.
Is the child born in middle-class America today predetermined to be many levels better off than the one born in the impoverished neighborhood of Bangladesh, or Tondo in Manila? Is the kid at an English suburb outside of London predetermined to have a better life than the one on the plains of Serengeti, Tanzania, who may never know what a soccer ball is? These kids' fates have been predetermined at birth.
If you are reading this from your desk top, or laptop or on your phone, whiling away the moments, you belong to just a fraction of the world's population to be able to do so. There are more people around the globe who are oblivious to even just a fraction of what has been predetermined you will have from the moment you were born.
Think about it. In today's climate of pandemic and other world crisis, we are forced to consider a host of so many things that bombard us daily. You made a decision to get vaccinated, you followed all the rules to keep you and your neighbors safe, there are talks of mandates to do this, to have that, so many it is a plague rather worse than what a plague is really like. On the other hand, the child in a family in the interior of Brazil's rainforest, one of a few villages still undiscovered or isolated from the rest of the world, is oblivious to wearing a mask inside and outside of classrooms as children do in some if not all modern societies, today. Can we still be talking about a better predetermined life of one over the other?
I think I have enough questions now to cause you to think. Causation is real, while free will is an illusion?
Enjoy your day!
Meanwhile, ponder this ..
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