Reflections on Free Will

This article is motivated by some comments I read on a philosophy post. It seems everybody believes in free will. Has nobody ever read Schopenhauer’s essay on free will? It is a very important question because the belief in free will does have some very perverse effects. But how can the belief in free will have any perverse consequences?

First of all what is it we call free will? Basically, the capacity for one individual to make decisions freely, so that each decision, lets say: “Should I turn left, or right?”, could have been equally one or the other. I decided to turn left freely, but could have decided also to turn right, there is nothing that has made me turn left. The belief in free will is the unbelief of any kind of destiny that you wouldn’t be able to escape from. And because we are so fond of freedom, most of us believe free will exists.

Maybe free will got so popular because it was the negation of the inevitable destiny that many religions exposed as the only truth, leaving man with no hope to escape a difficult life, it was your destiny, you could just accept it. Christianity developed a crumb of comfort: the hope of a better existence in death… But even within the Christian church the question of free will was present because if it didn’t exist it meant that man couldn’t be taken responsible for his bad actions. And the religions of the book quite like to make you feel guilty, it is their best stock-in-trade.

So, apart from having read Schopenhauer’s essay, in which he demonstrates that free will isn’t free, I experienced life, and for as much as I look into it there hasn’t been anything close to free will. I find particularly representative of his essay (and of my experience) a short sentence he wrote: “Man can indeed do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants”.

But after all who cares? Everybody should believe what they want! How can that particular belief in free will have a negative effect?

So now let’s just consider what precisely motivates this article: the example of domestic violence. Haven’t you ever heard someone say that they didn’t understand why a person stayed in a visibly toxic relationship? Because there is no reason a human would freely choose to live in hell, is there? Would you?

In the most recent researches on trauma consequences, namely PTSD and Complex PTSD, what comes to light is that it conditions one’s future choices in life, one’s reaction to different life stimuli. Even neuroscience seems to point out against any possible free will as Donald Hebb theorised in his book: The Organisation of Behaviour: a Neuropsychological Theory.

So here is one of the perverse effects of believing in free will: free will implies that a person living in a toxic relationship chooses to do so, and they do, but was that choice free? Or was it a choice conditioned by past experiences?

And when people judge another based on this belief in free will, they turn a victim into a willing accomplice, when that person was just following the path that their past created. Sometimes a conjecture of events makes it possible for someone to untie the bonds that kept them in the hell they were. And sometimes there is no such conjecture. Does that make one better than the other?

Free will is just another of those nice ideas that people who have had an easier path like to sustain, because it flatters their ego to believe that they made good choices in life. It is perverse because it compromises the idea that we were all born equal, because it prevents a more empathic society. We are what our life made us, and we should be at least empathic with the people that have had a different path.

Alice S. Dransfield

Further reading – A Schopenhauer essay: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/human/chapter3.html

ANTIDOTE FOR BABY FEVER

"If the act of procreation were neither the outcome of a desire nor accompanied by feelings of pleasure, but a matter to be decided on the basis of purely rational considerations, is it likely the human race would still exist? Would each of us not rather have felt so much pity for the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at least not wish to take it upon himself to impose the burden on it in cold blood?" - Arthur Schopenhauer

 
One of the most important - arguably, the most important - of the ethical questions which a generation may consider is that of the ethical tenability of human reproduction. After all, with few exceptions, we all bear within us the desire for procreation, at least instinctually - in males, lust, and women, maternity. One's answer to the question "should we reproduce" is pivotal - from the loins resounds the exhortation "Yes!"; from reason, "No!" At any rate, every generation has answered "yes", irrespective of whether the question was ever consciously considered; for most it is an implicit goal. But whom do we serve, when not our basest animal impulses, by answering this primordial call in the affirmative; what profit have we to gain in conjuring from nothing "a weak and sin-prone race, in order to hand it over to eternal damnation"?

If "rational" considerations furnish sufficient motive (e.g. advancing evolution, colonizing space, sating the curiosity drive and the lust for the other shore), then we are at least condemning multitudes to lifelong travail and suffering in the spirit of exploration - but the argument could be made that in the context of all human venture and enterprise hitherto, insofar as we have treated the courageous investigation of unknown vistas as an end in itself, the burden of history has impelled us. Indeed, the signal from heredity to every generation is one of exploration, expansion, exploitation. This justification has at least something of nobility to it; but radically few are those who found their decisions on these thoughts. Most blindly indulge their lust, either for copulation or for its ultimate product, and these lusts are never given the analysis they demand. But the rational among us can pose the question: is this really "right"?

Since foremost in one's contemplation of this problem must be the weighing of the sufferings of which the lives of all individuals are filled, I must take this as the chief criterion by which all judging of this problem be assessed; all other considerations are in my mind subordinate to this, for the spectrum of suffering is felt more immediately and more intensely by every living organism than any other phenomena, and often by orders of magnitude.  The manner in which most individuals approach this problem will often devolve upon the peculiar nature of his character and disposition, so that from the affable and easy-going man we may expect an affirmation of the rightness of reproduction, and from the depressive and anxious man a denial. But we seek not after an emotional assessment, encumbered by years of psychic baggage, but a rational one.

Without throwing the whole edifice of philosophy into question, I wonder not at the motives of philosophers, but at the breadth of vision they ultimately serve and the conclusions towards which they strive. It has been described as an "abnormal and thus superfluous exercise of the intellect"; if logic and rationality (the intellectual outgrowths of life), when turned inward upon the beings which devised them, yield the conclusion of the intrinsic vanity and futility of life (and therefore also of reasoning - at least of reasoning designed to account for the accomplishment of man's ends), how can we justify the perpetuation of our race?

Science, philosophy and all rational inquiry seem almost of themselves idle pastimes of beings who find themselves, suddenly, existing, without ever having wished to be, and who must do something with this existence so as to distract themselves from its monotony, insipidity, the thousand fold agonies visited upon everyone regardless of fortune, and the tyrannical absurdity of the whole. In this aspect life seems to be a penal colony, wherein our enslavement is an endless expiation of the guilt of our birth - the guilt of the innumerable generations, despite the pain and abasement characterizing their lives, assenting to continue the cyclical tragedies.

If we consider the drive to exploration and conquest the guiding force of procreation - the pursuit of our species of vaster and vaster frontiers of discovery - we subordinate the importance of the lives of all individuals to its realization. Yet, since these individuals are supposedly those who this exploration is ultimately designed to benefit, for whom is their altruism ultimately intended?

If we serve no other master than tireless exploration, expansion and dominance, how do we differ fundamentally from any other opportunistic species? How dissimilar then is the human race from an ant colony? What master do we serve when we strike out for the stars, declaring as our compass "discovery"?

To the entire question "to spawn, or not to spawn", I pose a humanistic syllogism: IF evolution produces in the higher animals greater receptivity to pain ("Pain is the origin of consciousness - Dostoevsky), AND pain is bad, THEN evolution is producing greater and greater quantities and magnitudes of pain THEREFORE life ought not to exist.

It is the "net pleasure vs. net pain" concept: since the net pain potential of this world (i.e., the total ways in which one could suffer and the frequency of this suffering) overwhelmingly outweighs that of its net pleasure potential, everyone - at least, every compassionate and empathic person - must agree that life is better off not existing.

"So just because a lot of life is suffering, that means life doesn't possess its own great pleasures? Doesn't the pursuit of joy and fulfillment justify these sufferings?" That is a matter to be answered on entirely personal terms, and a person cannot answer it 'til she has been born, and lived long enough to comprehend its implications. - - But her parents will already have committed the sin of birthing her, quite without consideration of the potential tragedies they were setting in motion, on nothing more than the gamble that she would answer in the affirmative.

[Quoted liberally and lazily from Schopenhauer]

Tyler Threske

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 34