How did you decide...
...to read that title?
"Free will" and "self" are intimately connected. If there's no core "me"--myself--inside me (you just can't talk about this stuff without getting hopelessly entangled in language problems), who's there to make decisions? Who is it who actually engages in free will? Take away self and you take away free will. Accept we have no free will and there goes the whole point of having a self in the first place.
From the ancient Greeks to David Hume and John Dewey and William James, the issue has usually been framed as a clash between free will and determinism: either we're free agents, making free decisions, or it's all determined in
advance (map the universe down to the smallest detail, and there's no choice about what happens next...the eight ball has no choice but to drop into the corner pocket if the cue ball hits it just thus).
However, I'm not sure if the free will-determinism debate can really add anything to our understanding of consciousness. They seem to be to be incommensurable--free will is a feeling; determinism is a process. Setting apples up against oranges.
Whether or not our actions and thoughts are determined from one nanosecond to the next doesn't seem much to matter. They probably are--that's pretty much what a scientific, materialist view of the world seems to tell us--but so what? Would certain knowledge that we're going through our lives like robots make any difference to how we feel, what we do? The staunchest determinist would still run out of a burning theater and feel anxious if a cop pulled them over. That's how we're built.
What is useful, it seems to me, is to try to pin down a bit what we could possibly mean by "free will". Lift your arm now.
___________________________________
Did you do it? Did you remain still? How did you decide what to do? Any appeal to your "inner self" making the decision founders, as ever, on how it decided--on it's inner self, perhaps? Did it depend on your predisposition, your morning's coffee intake, whether you were breast-fed, your environment? All of which are pre-existing conditions. Where's the room for freewill?
"Well, I thought about it, and then I decided not to, it seemed silly!" OK. How did these thoughts and that decision come about? If not from something already existing (the determinist point of view), perhaps some random quantum mechanical happenings deep in your brain? But if free will means anything at all, surely it has to be transparent, conscious? Hidden randomness doesn't sound much like free will.
So where does this leave us?
I'm an admirer of Sue Blackmore, now a freelance writer and lecturer on consciousness (isn't it great someone can make a living with this stuff?!). Her approach, after dismissing free will, is to, for instance, sit down in a restaurant, look at the menu and think, "I wonder what I'm going to order?" After practicing this for many years, she claims to have lost her sense of having free will. (But not yet, for more than a few moments, her sense of self.)
How did you decide to read down to here?
"Free will" and "self" are intimately connected. If there's no core "me"--myself--inside me (you just can't talk about this stuff without getting hopelessly entangled in language problems), who's there to make decisions? Who is it who actually engages in free will? Take away self and you take away free will. Accept we have no free will and there goes the whole point of having a self in the first place.
From the ancient Greeks to David Hume and John Dewey and William James, the issue has usually been framed as a clash between free will and determinism: either we're free agents, making free decisions, or it's all determined in
advance (map the universe down to the smallest detail, and there's no choice about what happens next...the eight ball has no choice but to drop into the corner pocket if the cue ball hits it just thus).However, I'm not sure if the free will-determinism debate can really add anything to our understanding of consciousness. They seem to be to be incommensurable--free will is a feeling; determinism is a process. Setting apples up against oranges.
Whether or not our actions and thoughts are determined from one nanosecond to the next doesn't seem much to matter. They probably are--that's pretty much what a scientific, materialist view of the world seems to tell us--but so what? Would certain knowledge that we're going through our lives like robots make any difference to how we feel, what we do? The staunchest determinist would still run out of a burning theater and feel anxious if a cop pulled them over. That's how we're built.
What is useful, it seems to me, is to try to pin down a bit what we could possibly mean by "free will". Lift your arm now.
___________________________________
Did you do it? Did you remain still? How did you decide what to do? Any appeal to your "inner self" making the decision founders, as ever, on how it decided--on it's inner self, perhaps? Did it depend on your predisposition, your morning's coffee intake, whether you were breast-fed, your environment? All of which are pre-existing conditions. Where's the room for freewill?
"Well, I thought about it, and then I decided not to, it seemed silly!" OK. How did these thoughts and that decision come about? If not from something already existing (the determinist point of view), perhaps some random quantum mechanical happenings deep in your brain? But if free will means anything at all, surely it has to be transparent, conscious? Hidden randomness doesn't sound much like free will.
So where does this leave us?
I'm an admirer of Sue Blackmore, now a freelance writer and lecturer on consciousness (isn't it great someone can make a living with this stuff?!). Her approach, after dismissing free will, is to, for instance, sit down in a restaurant, look at the menu and think, "I wonder what I'm going to order?" After practicing this for many years, she claims to have lost her sense of having free will. (But not yet, for more than a few moments, her sense of self.)
How did you decide to read down to here?
posted by barryevans at
12:46 PM
1 Comments:
Fascinating!
But doesn't this line of thinking also call into question the very existence of the actual self that I am experiencing at this moment? If there is no self inside me, no conscious will making decisions, then what am I but a bunch of particles of matter that just happened (or, of course, didn't just happen, happened because of certain circumstances)to be collected in this spot. And if that's true, what differentiates this bunch of particles from the air surrounding what I call my arm, or the object I call a computer?
By
Anonymous, at March 12, 2006
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