The Case for Free Will

the debate over the existence of freewill has gone on for centuries between the terminus and libertarians recently Sam Harris wrote a short book in an attempt to sum up the arguments for determinism and make the case that we do not have free will free wills and illusion our wills are simply not of our own making thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control we do not have the freedom we think we have free will is actually more than an illusion or less in that

it cannot be made conceptually coherent either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them or they are the product of chance we are not responsible for them the man's choice to shoot the president is determined by a certain pattern of neural activity which is in turn the product of prior causes perhaps an unfortunate coincidence of bad genes and unhappy childhood lost sheep and cosmic ray bombardment what can it possibly mean to say that his will is free determinist like Hera strongly believed the free wills and illusion and everything we

think and believe has been determined by prior causes so we are not responsible for our actions michio kaku sums up the implications of determinism like this Newtonian determinism says that the universe is a clock a gigantic clock that's wound up at the beginning of time and it's been ticking ever since according to newton's laws of motion so what you're going to eat 10 years from now on January 1st has already been fixed it's already known using newton's laws of motion so is this true is everything we do completely determine by prior causes well I would

argue no this argument is nothing new and advocates of free will of long responded to it the first thing to note is determinist like Harris seem to think that since we are unable to pick our past our genes or character in various neurological factors this means we do not have free will meaning I'm only free if I get to choose these things if I just find myself with an innate desire then I am NOT free however there is a problem here this is not what free will is advocates of freewill have never concluded free will

means we get to pick our past our genes our character place of birth and so on what Harris has suggested is a much stronger type of freedom no one advocates in the article bait-and-switch alvin plantinga responds to Harris and points out the difference between free will and a stronger sense of freedom he refers to as maximal autonomy Harris's notion of freedom is really an idea of what we might call maximal autonomy it is obvious we do not have maximal autonomy we aren't free in that sense indeed it isn't so much as possible that we be

free in that sense that is because as he thinks of it I act freely on a given occasion only if I myself freely choose to have the desires and affections I then act on and furthermore I myself really bring it about that I do have them if Harris is right it is possible that I act freely only if it is possible that I perform an infinite number of actions each one a matter of bringing it about that I have a certain set of desires and affections clearly no one has time these busy days for that

Harris is certainly right that we do not have maximal autonomy but nothing follows about having freedom ie the sort of freedom we ordinarily think we have the sort required for moral responsibility what we have here looks like a classic bait-and-switch announce that you will show we do not have freedom in the ordinary sense required by moral responsibility and then proceed to argue that we do not have freedom in the sense of maximal autonomy it is certainly true that we do not have freedom in that sense not even God could have that kind of freedom that

is because God could not have performed infinitely many actions no doubt he could have but because God is necessarily all-knowing all-powerful and perfectly good this means that God is not freely chosen to have that character there never was a time at which he had both the power to bring it about that he had that character and also the power to bring about that he did not have that character and Harris does spend most of the book arguing we do not have maximal autonomy but he also argues as do most of terminus that we do not

have freedom in the ordinary sense meaning we are unable to make free decisions and everyday choices and every choice we do make has already been determined however I don't think that is the case the argument only provides the possibility for determinism no direct link can be shown that our choices are directly the result of past events if one has a reason for his actions it doesn't automatically mean that reason causes action in understanding why we make certain choices that doesn't mean we are unable to make choices at all the determinists say the opposite and we

can't escape it where else corrode choices come from if they are not the result of prior causes I believe the philosopher on Iran responded this well and though I would not agree with her on many things the argument for free will is very well articulated while determinists say choices are impossible nor the result of prior causes Rand argued man's free choices come from focusing his mind whether to focus it or not how much to and what to focus on man can keep his mind in full focus drift away without focus or avoid focusing and refuse

to think we can consider all relative facts and conditions and make a conscious effort to think of additional factors it might play a part we obviously cannot make free choices on some knowledge we acquire but our freedom is controlling what ideas and arguments to focus on which allows us to select what we think is true so advocates for free well like ran do not argue there are no reasons which motivate our actions that we are free and in control of what facts and ideas of the mind will focus on so freedom isn't focusing and thinking

as I and Rand said a social environment can either force a man to think nor prevent him from thinking but a social environment can offer incentives or impediments it can make the exercise of one's rational faculty easier or harder it can encourage thinking and penalize evasion or vice versa so advocates of free will have never argued our free will means we must have freedom in the sense of maximal autonomy instead it is argued we have free will in the ordinary sense which happens in the rational mind through processes of thinking and focusing however the most

crucial piece of evidence for free will comes from the recent advancements in quantum physics though I in rank can make a good case for free will her belief that we can have free will in the realist objective world is false recently Princeton mathematicians John Conway and Simon Cochin demonstrated their free will theorem which states we can only have free will if we live in an idealist and deterministic universe instead of a realist deterministic universe so the quantum level must behave in deterministically instead of working like clockwork determined atoms there is no middle ground according to

Conway in coaching either we are free in the universe is in deterministic or there is no free will and the versus determined however recent advancements in quantum physics have demonstrated that the quantum level behaves in an indeterminate ik manner recent experiments by Anton Zeilinger and others have demonstrated that intuitive features of realism must be abandoned for years leading up to these recent experiments determine its held onto hope that the collapse of the wavefunction in quantum mechanics was not really in deterministic and observer dependent that there were hidden variables waiting to be discovered these hidden variable

theories would explain why a particles position only appeared to be dependent on the observer however we now know this is not the case in 2007 quantum physics said goodbye to reality has new experiments verified the violation of the famous theorem bells and equality which demonstrated that hidden variable theories were in fact false in a particles position is dependent on the observer in 2011 Kozlov Bruckner and Johannes Koffler demonstrated this even affects the macro level the existence of reality is dependent on there being an observer nothing is certain unless an observer makes a measurement in quantum

theory particles can be in multiple places at once until the moment you make a measurement when the particle must end up in only one of those locations which means nothing is certain until an observer makes a measurement so in conclusion what does this all mean it means the actions of the observer cannot be determined by prior causes as determinism states remember determine us say that using classical physics we can know the exact position of every particle and how the laws of the universe work therefore we can't predict exactly what will happen in the future using

these laws however at the quantum level it is completely in deterministic and nothing is certain unless an observer makes a measurement physicist Tom Hartfield says essentially quantum mechanics tells us that there are things which we cannot know about the future things which are not predetermined but happen with some factor of chance or randomness although many things in the world may be predicted everything is not predetermined and our actions do not unfold mechanically in a manner predetermined since the very moment of the Big Bang free will is preserved so it seems the science does not support

determinism ever since the Heisenberg uncertainty principle was introduced we cannot discount the existence of free will Heisenberg then comes along and proposes the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and says nonsense there's uncertainty you don't know where the electron is it could be here here or many places simultaneously this of course I'm Stein hated because he said God doesn't play dice with the universe well hey get used to it Einstein was wrong God does play dice every time we look at electron it moves there's uncertainty with regards to the position of the electron so what does that mean

for free will it means in some sense we do have some kind of free will no one can determine your future events given your past history there's always the wild card there's always the possibility of uncertainty in whatever we do