Free Will and Determinism: Introduction

What is freedom? Not in the political sense, but in the sense of our ability to make free decisions. Are we machines? Can we ever over-ride our programming? Our bodies, including our brains, work like everything else in nature by cause and effect. But is there, in humans at least, something beyond this which makes us genuinely free? In other words, do will have free will or are we physically determined?

Obviously the answer makes a real difference to how we view ourselves, what we think a person is, how we approach our futures. It also, of course, affects our attitude to morality. Should we hold people responsible for their behaviour? If not (because they have not freely chosen to behave as they did), should we punish them?

The white snooker ball hits the red snooker ball and they each go off in certain directions and stop. Repeat the event exactly and the same consequences will be repeated. Even a leaf twirling in a breeze isn't free. Its apparently random movements are actually the result of complex causes. But you, when you make a choice, is your choice causally determined? Of course, you may have good reasons for your choice - you prefer A to B, or you can't afford B - but we must be careful not to confuse reasons with causes. Reasons are rational, not physical. They can be ignored.

If you think all our actions are physically caused, either by physical events in our bodies of which we are unaware or by mental states, such as desires, which themselves have physical causes, then you are a (physical)determinist. There are other kinds of determinism - eg religious and logical - but we are interested in physical or causal determinism. This is a scientific concept. Everything in the universe obeys the laws of nature: everything that happens can be explained purely in terms of cause and effect. Each cause was itself caused. Every event is connected by a long chain of causes to...the first cause. Everything is completely predictable, or would be if we had perfect knowledge. Some things are unpredictable due to complexity - and that may include human behaviour - but in theory even we are part of the causal chain. So when we think we are making a free decision, we are deluded. This is the claim made by "hard" determinists. Whatever we think our reasons for decisions are, our volitions, intentions, purposes, etc., what is really happenening is that physical causal mechanisms (most immedidiately of course, in our brains and other body parts)are causing us to behave in certain ways.

In response to this we can question the nature of causation, as Hume did - he argued it was merely a question of our human habit of expecting one thing to follow another when we have seen that happen a few times. (We never see a physical event that we can say is the cause, only smaller and smaller events occurring under maginification.) Also, we can refer to quantum physics and the unpredictability of subatomic particles. But these points don't really affect hard determinism. After all, scientists are getting better and better at explaining and predicting human behaviour, discovering paterns, accounting for behavioural characteristics in terms of brain events; and there is some evidence (eg from Libet) that messages are sent out to our limbs by our brains before we have made a conscious decision to move them - this would suggest that our feeling of freedom is illusory.

On top of the neurological and other biological causes affecting our behaviour, there is evidence that culture also has a causal effect on us - ie our environment, upbringing, religion, etc. This is still to be counted as physical because it is about patterns of behaviour, dispositions, being created in the brain during our formative years. Culture contributes to our "hard-wiring".

So, if hard determinists are right, you are pretty much just a very complex machine. It means your AS level results are already inevitable. There's nothing you can do about it. Even if you decide to work harder, that will only be because you are already predisposed to make the decision to work harder. Oh, well!