Member-only story
Free Will, Determinism and All That Jazz
Are we free or aren’t we?
Back in school I had a friend who did not believe in free will. He confided this to me one day during lunch break. Atoms, molecules, organisms: all of reality was just a domino show set in motion some remote time in the past and running on the inescapable rails of determinism ever since. How could you influence anything if there was no you that could be isolated from the fall of the dominoes? Whatever decision you thought you made was pure illusion. There was no agency, no choice. You might as well give up, he concluded. If you did, you had no choice but to do that anyway. It was a philosophical argument, but looking at his face, I could see it was more than that. It was an expression of hopelessness.
I could not accept this reasoning. Something was off that I could not quite put my finger on. If one had no agency, how could one even choose to “give up”? I argued. Wasn’t he, in effect, making the case for a specific choice, while in the same breath disavowing the existence of any capacity to choose in the first place? Clearly, if the universe was deterministic — and I was not litigating that question, despite quantum randomness — then it was not compelling us to give up and despair. If we (by which I mean, people in general) were compelled, then we were compelled to adopt the many and varied philosophical stances which we…
