Great argument against free will

I've written a lot about free will over the years, arguing for good reason that it doesn't exist.

(You can find those posts by searching my blogs for "free will" in the Google search box in the right sidebar.)

Here's a great concise argument against free will in the form of a letter to the editor in a recent issue of New Scientist. 

Published 9 June 2021

From Adrian Bowyer, Foxham, Wiltshire, UK

A number of people quoted in the article on the hypothesis of quantum superdeterminism criticise it by saying it would make free will untenable (15 May, p 36).

Setting aside that this criticism confuses the desirable with the real, free will doesn’t need determinism (quantum or otherwise) to make it untenable. All it needs is logic.

Every event must be caused by one or more preceding events, be spontaneous or result from both. The two categories – caused and spontaneous – are disjoint, complemental and together universal; there can be no other sort of event instigator.

Thought is a parallel and sequential collection of events. If they are all caused, then there is no free will. If some are spontaneous, then there is still no free will: a spontaneous event is, by definition, not willed.

Comments

[Spence Tepper]

The only thing wrong in that statement is the word "spontaneous".
Everything has a cause.

[Spence Tepper]

If you are free to decide plan A over plan B you can call that your will. But your will has been carefully curated, conditioned by your upbringing, the society you live in, your choices these help direct. And so your choice of plan A is predictable.

Free choice can be defined as the degree to which your highly engineered will can move unobstructed.

From that perspective even you are subject to the tyranny of your will.

And occasionally what life forces you to face, preventing your will from acting freely, is actually helpful, even liberating you from that harsh and unstoppable will of yours.

And maybe giving you a tiny window into that will, so that you see it isn't actually always right, like it loves to think. Your will thinks that if it is free to act without restriction, then you are free. Like a manipulative politicin, or fools you into thinking your interests and freedom rely 100% on its freedom. But you may be free only when your will has been constrained.

[Spence Tepper]

I used to think that the really important things aren't what happens in life but how we choose to espond to those events.

But now I see that it is the events we have zero control over that actually helps us most. Not so much what we choose at all, but what we are forced to accept, and cannot turn away from.

Then simply accepting and adapting which is also not in our hands is also liberating.

The creation is much more than me myself and I. It's at those moments we are freed of all three tyrants, if only briefly.

[Dungeness]

@ Spence: "The only thing wrong in that statement is the word "spontaneous".
Everything has a cause.

Hm, is God's "will" to spontaneously create a world a cause or just
a dualist's attempt to understand why it happened though? I mean,
if "God" willed it, what gave rise to his desire? It presupposes a
framework of time-space and endless causation.

On the other hand, maybe "God's Creation" was "spontaneous"
and truly outside time-space and "will". Doesn't Hinduism use the
term God's Lila (God's Play) to capture that nuance? Anyone,
anyone...

[La Madrugada]

Then simply accepting and adapting which is also not in our hands is also liberating.

Bravo Spence! it took me 50 years to understand this!

[Spence Tepper]

Hi Dungeness:
If there is no distinction between thought and action to God, then the issue of Will is just our way of trying to understand why all this.

You could say that understanding science is understanding God's will.
There is a magnificent design in nature, and all things arise from that design. But that design is itself evolving in play with what is created.
So long as we are in time, we see the movement.

Spontaneous is an interesting word. Spontaneous combustion really isn't.

"Performed or occurring as a result of a sudden inner impulse or inclination and without premeditation or external stimulus."

All things have a cause, an external cause. But if you are God there is no distinction between internal and external. Again, human terms for how humans function. We function as elements of the creation. We are distinct. But the entire creation isn't distinct from itself. There is even no before and after, taking all time as a whole, just a progression through time.

So long as there is time, there is a progression, but if there is a creator there can be no will separate from action.

This is really a logical argument, but it bears out in observation. Looking everywhere for a will, we don't find it. But we do find things arising from design, and design itself evolving.

[Dungeness]

@ Spence: "This is really a logical argument, but it bears out in observation. Looking everywhere for a will, we don't find it. But we do find things arising from design, and design itself evolving."

I recall vaguely Ishwar Puri talked of "God changing his mind" as signifying
an a priori event. The dramatist plays with the outcome as it unfolds perhaps
and the audience is none the wiser.

[Spence Tepper]

Hi Dungeness
If you watch a movie in reverse, seeing the effects then their cause, you get a glimpse of our own situation. We are viewing time backwards looking for causes in effects. And that is only because time is actually running backwards in this dimension of reality. We've gotten used to it. It's how we are raised. We try to build our sciences on this timeline. But that will never lead to much because time is currently running backwards here. We are getting to interpret every event we see as if it is all moving forward. This is the reality we make of this reality.
But it's really moving backwards. Is the universe expanding or contracting? It must be expanding right? But that's backwards. Forward movement is the gathering of matter, time and energy from a state of entropy. Moving to the state of entropy is actually backwards. It can only occur because time is moving backwards here. We view decay as normal, though we are always trying to build and create. Intuitively we understand that creation is the sum of thought, effort and events. But actually we aren't living in that. We are paddling upstream against the flow of time in every act of creation, yet we view time as moving forward and accept decay and dissipation as normal conditions.

It is only when one can see a different place with a forward time sequence that we then understand how backwards moving this time here is moving.

Just when you thought I was making sense I throw another monkey wrench into it with these remarks about time.

[Dungeness]

@ Spence : "Just when you thought I was making sense I throw another monkey wrench into it with these remarks about time."

That makes sense. We live in an eternal "now" and if we leapfrogged
forward suddenly, we'd spot that well worn old dialog. Been here, acted
the part. It's a play we even know the ending to. But wait, I've forgotten
the first act and that guy behind the curtain. Let me reprise the role.
Scene by scene.

[Spence Tepper]

Hi Dungeness:
Perceptive as usual.
I've been re-reading Plato / Socrates lately and he remarks that looking at things brings up memories of them before this life. We get an impression immediately, a recollection of thought, even from a different place, a place where such things as justice and beauty exist in their true forms, just from the sensory association. Otherwise, the curtain is absolutely drawn. But in that moment, a connection to the source, another place.

In meditation, the curtain is opened. But after meditation, here, it is closed again.

Living here is living backwards. Like in a story that has already happened. Perhaps that is also a common reflection as we age.

Your comments put the pieces together for me. Thanks

[777 -]

Somewhere somebody asked if Truth was relativ

I wrote:
Only God knows ultimate Truth,
It s the same as free Will.
Close to HIM you have plenty
Far from HiM almost zero
So, it's important to start knowing yourself,
because YOU are, always were HIM/HER in amnesia
❤
S/HE wanted it this way ( at least in this tiny creation) to fill eternity with Love,
all the time, all the way more Love