Philosophy Of Free Will

What if every decision you thought you were making, was hypothetically predictable prior to you being consciously aware of which option you would choose? What if your control over your actions and decisions and thus the path your life will take is an illusion? What if free will is an extremely misguided belief humans have? Philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and several other disciplines have spent over two millennia, constructing hypotheses and theories, to then promptly contradict them or trump them with opposing views, with regards to the presence or lack there of, of free will. Hundreds of scientists and theorists have proposed ideas and built upon those to attempt to come up with an understanding of free will that allows for a tangible

For example, if I should happen to walk down the street to get food, the mere action of my movement can be explained by the fact that my being hungry has caused me to walk down the street and move my legs, and to keep moving my legs at all I need food. Thus, the body is in need of nourishment, and from laws of nature and laws discovered by science the body does in fact need food as a consumable source of cellular energy to promote life in a system such as the human body. It is then to be deduced that if a definite law of nature caused my acting, then I must be in accordance with scientific laws, and no other alternative except that law has to be the one that I shall act on. If this is so, one cannot do otherwise than obey the law. Thus, our freedom of will is absent due to the compelling laws of nature and their innate causal behavior. Now that Holbach has clarified this, he moves on to say something on the nature of the human mind’s will, or more specifically its acts of willing. Holbach states that the will is a modification of the brain (Holbach 462). And it is from the brain, which makes one act in accordance with certain desires or impulses that act on the brain or mind that are outside of one’s control. A stronger desire, or motive as Holbach calls it, may suspend a former desire, so that you are in fact always acting on your strongest desire due to the fact that you want to be content or happy with your choice, and this desire determines your will. For

The first matter to be noted is that this view is in no way in contradiction to science. Free will is a natural phenomenon, something that emerged in nature with the emergence of human beings, with their

Proof that free will does exist is found in “Is Determinism inconsistent with Free Will?” by Walter T. Stace when he states, “For when it comes to doing anything practical, even for the most trivial kind, they invariably behave as if they and others were free” (728). The “they” Stace is referring to are “professors of philosophy or psychology.” An example of free will in the form of making a choice is from “To the Lady” by Mitsuye Yamada in the following statement, “Should’ve ran off to Canada. Should’ve hijacked a plane to Algeria. Should’ve pulled myself up from my bra straps” (772). The person in the story could have made all of these choices and more, but they did not. They chose to remain the Japanese internment camps. The final example of a choice that was made is Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” about if he should shoot the elephant or not when he praised that, “The sole thought in [his] mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill” (726). If he chose to kill the elephant everything would work out. If he chose to not, he could have quite possibly been murdered. He had two choices, one was filled with more negative consequences so he went with the other. No matter what surrounds the choices in a decision, one always has the right to chose because of

Cha-ching, that's the sound of my money because I chose to go by my best judgement and make my own decisions. I make my own choices because I have free will. I think it's better to learn from your mistakes as well.

Many scientists reject the idea of free will and determinism. Many neuroscientists and psychologists think that free will is an illusion. Neuroscientists believe that the brain makes the decisions before us, when making a decision. When we act, the decision we make is causally effective. Brain activity however, is also causally effective. Neuroscientist Benjamin Libet argued that the brain tells the body what to do about a half-second before we feel an urge to do it. He argued that we have to drastically revise our ideas about free will. Libet believed we have free will in a very narrow sense. We can restrain or initiate a brain’s command to the body. But we only have about a tenth of a second to do that. John-Dylan Haynes did a similar experiment

Morality, a body of standards or principles derived from a code of conduct from a particular philosophy, religion or culture, which people follow to guide them in their consciences decisions. While many people believe in religious moral codes, there is a cultural code that is based on goodness and righteousness. Nevertheless, religion and cultural codes persuade the choices people make, affecting a person's free will, the ability to act at one's own discretion. Religion offers morality, affecting free will, by the Gospel, The Ten Commandments, and other holy scriptures. Culture in today's society offers morality through goodness and righteousness, guiding people's free will based on their conscious decisions.

We experience free-will in thought processes that require cognition; however in more automotive processes that require little thinking, we don’t have free-will. For the purposes of this paper, we will assume that free will is any action divorced from reflexive types of responses. Using this definition, we can assert that free-will can be turned on and off in certain situations.

Does free will exist or is it all an illusion? This question has always bothered people since the ancient time and now it bothers us more than ever. The increase of humankind comprehension in subjects like physics, neuroscience, social science and more; made this question unfathomable. Great minds like Sir Isaac Newton concluded that everything like the motion of planets, stars and the universe, our decisions are all predetermined. On the other hand, Quantum physic proposes the opposite; some scientist suggest free will is the byproduct of the random behavior of subatomic particles. Thomas Eagleman’s article “The Brain on Trial” revolves around this debate of free will but from the point of view of neuroscience and applies it to criminal activity. Nevertheless, his view is fascinating and needs to be praised for his different approach to solving society 's problems. However I disagree with some of Eagleman’s points and his new legal system is impractical and will lead to more problems.

In the roadmap of life, each person has the capacity to change their course. When something in life doesn’t seem quite right we always have the opportunity to make a change. Ultimately, it’s our free-will and decisions that determine how everything in our life will play out. These ideas follow some of the common themes within existentialism. Specifically, in my life, the themes of existentialism closely follow some of my personal beliefs. Some ideas of existentialism that remain true to me include the ideas of free-will and living in the moment.

Authors aren’t the only ones who have pondered the existence and impact of fate and free will. Scientists and theologians have utilized their respective expertise to justify their beliefs. Scientists, in particular, have an intriguing view of free will because they have a unique look into what would make those decisions. Scientists who have conducted research on the workings of the brain revealed an “intricate networks of…shaped by both genes and environment. But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams” (Cave). This research means that any things that would be deemed as actions under free will, are actually the electrical

What is free will? As stated in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, free will is “the ability to choose how to act; the ability to make choices that are not controlled by fate or God.” Are we free? Do we have the brain capacity to exercise free will? This is a widely debated topic by scientists and philosophers alike. The answer is almost always no. There is no way that we are completely free. But why do they think this? Most scientists believe that everything is predetermined. Scientists Hans Helmut Kornhuber and Lüder Deecke discovered a phenomenon called “readiness potential.” They discovered that the brain entrs into a certain state prior to conscious awareness. Basically, your brain knows what it is going to do before your conscious knows. They believed that there is no room in our brain, in our society, to be completely free and to exercise free will. It’s just impossible. Even Charles Darwin, the father of the theory of evolution, said “everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.”

For centuries, the concept of free will has been a debatable philosophical question and whether or not we possess it. Only recently, however, have psychologists applied empirical methods to the debate of free will. Rather than trying to determine the existence of free will, psychologists and experimental philosophers have undertaken more pragmatic issues such as determining the impact of believing in free will

Even though our knowledge is telling us that we do not possess free will, most of us are loathe to accept this conclusion. We think, if I do not have free will, then it is not important whatever I do. I might just as well stay in bed all day. Such reaction is emotional, not logical. It is this kind of negative emotional reaction which inhibits us from accepting the logical conclusion of determinism. The following is a simple thought exercise which may help us understand the deception which our emotions are perpertrating upon upon our intellects. Consider the following similations of an “undetermined universe” and a “determined universe.” Suppose that a new car is to be given away by your local community association on Saturday night. Every adult in the community is eligible. In the undetermined universe, the winner of the car will be drawn at

Casual determinism put simply, is the theory that all things happen for a particular reason and everything is predetermined. It is the idea all the events in one’s life can be explained, and each event has a particular reason for being. If everything is predetermined, then this therefore suggests that the future is fixed which further suggests that we can possibly predict the behavior of things. The theory of determinism ultimately suggests that we don’t the capacity to have free will because all future events are destined to occur, and furthermore we do not posses the knowledge to figure out whether it can be proved true or false (Hoefer). There has been three positions that have developed concerning the theory of causal determinism: hard determinist, compatibilist or soft determinist, and compatibilist.