The question of whether or not a human being decides his own actions has always irritated me slightly. Something about it just rubs me the wrong way. This is not because I prefer one answer to the other, but because I cannot make the distinction between the two concepts themselves. I certainly see a difference between me making my own decisions and some other person making them for me. There, the things that decide are clearly external from my body, and there is a nice, intuitive feelconcept of the difference between myself and someone else. I am not my brother, for instance. On the deeper levels, I might argue against this seemingly obvious statement, but here I am concerned with something else. The proponent of free will often says something like this:
You can point to all the developments we have made in science, and all the studies we have done on the human brain, but my being must consist of something more than simply the workings of the neurons and such in my head. There is something more.
Whether they mean that this something more is supposed to be physically operating from outside the body I do not know, but I had always guessed that they meant something operating from inside the body., and, in fact, from within the brain itself. What this means, if I understand it correctly, is that there is something we have not discovered about the brain that makes up the mind. This seems reasonable to me, since the brain is such a difficult thing to study, in its complexity and preciousness. But, somehow, these folks seem to mean more than this, for, if I were to say, "ah ha, you are quite right! I have just found something in the brain we did not know about before, and this is how it works," no one would step forward and say it is a victory for the idea of free will. Some might even think of it as an attack against the idea. Why is this? I think it is because it is explained. Or it may be simply that it is explainable. Is this the distinction between free will and determinism? If we can explain ourselves completely, then we must not, in fact, be ourselves?
Something must be making our decisions for us, doing our thinking for us and such, and this we can use to define the creature we refer to as "I" or "me." If these things do not obey the well-established laws of physics, then the well establish laws of physics are false, and need to be modified, so that the "me" obeys them.
How about this for a distinction? Perhaps the fundamental difference between free will and determinism is that, if we have no free will, then some highly sophisticated theory could predict our every action. There could be various degrees of determinism, in which theories become more and more sophisticated in order to accurately predict the decisions we make. Thus, an infinite requirement of sophistication woiuld be free will itself. What this means is that the universe itself would have the potential for its own free will (if our minds do and our minds are in the universe). Richard Feinman once said the goal of science is to prove ourselves wrong as fast as possible. If there is no potential end to this proving ourselves wrong, then the universe requires an infinitely sophisticated theory to explain itself as well.
Take a ball and cut it in half. Now continue cutting it in half forever. Do you ever reach an indivisible particle? What if someone shows you that, no indeed, we do not; that instead, I can simply talk about half that and half the next thing. Never mind if this is true or not. Just imagine the implications. Our brain is made of these particles, and thus, there are an infinite number of elements that go into every action our minds take. So if I put all these elements together, then I should be able to predict everything I will do, but there are an infinite number of these, swhich means I have free will, even though every action is determined.
Okay, so this is a kind of classical way of thinking of it, but I think the point is only reinforced with the advent of quantum mechanics.
Now realize that there is no reason for me to be able to keep cutting the particles. We don't know how space works on ever scale. It may not exist in any recognizable way at small enough scales. If I cut the ball in this kind of spcae, it may not half, but instead play me a songs of the London Symphony Orchestra, or become a goldfish, or something even less plausible. Which does this support, free will or determinism? I say, again, both. Does the situation disobey the laws of physics? By definition, it cannot. The laws change to meet what we see. And is the mind now so limited in what it can create? Never. Isn't such a concept what we see as a type of spirit or soul? It is so wild and beyond our undertanding that one might even say it is to strange to be the sould; too complex, yet simple, or too hard to believe. |
) Perhaps I associate my brain with the 'Id'.