Free Will

It certainly feels like you chose to pick up this paper and read these words. You feel as if you could have decided to rip this paper up after reading the title instead continuing to read this introduction. The notion that you don’t have a free will is ludicrous—without one, you are no longer responsible for your actions. However asinine this claim seems at first, it is indeed the case. In fact, I will exhaustively prove that there is no free will in the next one and a half pages. My proof has three points, each of which are enough to reveal the illusion. I will indicate when each of these points has been made so you don’t waste your time reading a simple logical deduction; at any point you are “free” to skip to the third page, where I detail what a lack of free will necessitates regarding the mind and soul.

Before continuing, I need to note that following this argument can make you feel crazy, especially if you are predisposed to certain medical conditions. Since the whole of society is built on the construct of free will, cutting through the illusion can be an odd and possibly unsatisfying experience. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel: the third page contains a positive spin on this truth. Please see your doctor if you don’t feel better thereafter.

Since my proposition needs only a few logical deductions to verify, I will define each relevant term to make everything as clear as possible. I define will to be the ability to choose. When I offer you three bowls of ice cream and you pick one, you are exercising your will. Now pick a bowl: vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry. I define free will to be the ability to have chosen differently under the same circumstances. If we went back in time 10 seconds to when you first read this paragraph, could you have chosen a different flavor? Under the same circumstances, (since we went back in time, you would have no knowledge of what you previously chose) you could not have chosen differently. You would have had the same train of thought or impulse to decide your flavor. That is a completely reasonable statement, yes? This is the first point where you can stop reading and skip to the third page. If you agree that you could not have made a different choice under the same circumstances, then you agree that there is no free will.

I’ll briefly touch on an intuitive counterargument you could produce to the ice cream example: quantum randomness somehow influencing your decision. Chances are you have no actual clue how quantum randomness works (I certainly don’t), but if we trust physics experts at all, it is possible that you would have chosen a different flavor due to some emergent randomness in your brain structure. And I’d agree with you. But hopefully we can agree that a random will is not a free will. I again offer you the option to skip to page three.

I now assume that you are simply interested in what I have to say or want some clarification on what exactly I mean by circumstances. You might think that since you can exert free will on your circumstances, you have free will. Reasonable, but false! I define circumstances to be the complex interaction of genetics and environment that influence your decisions. Since you did not choose your circumstances at birth, you could not have made your first decision differently. It inductively follows that if you went back in time and relived your life, you could not have made any decision differently than you had (disregarding randomness, which we know does not lead to a free will). A little weird to think about, right? You can also think of this argument as follows: since every effect has a cause, and you did not exert free will on your initial cause (birth), then none of your actions can be governed by free will.

So how do soul and mind fit into this worldview? Let’s assume you have a soul. Typically, if you believe that you have a soul, you believe that your soul allows you to escape the causal chain. Believing that anything can escape the causal chain implies that there exist things that are fundamentally unchangeable. This view is archaic, and patently false. After centuries of physics, we still have definitively not found unchanging elementary pwritings. But even if you have a permanent, unchanging soul, you didn’t choose which soul you had, therefore you do not have free will. Even if you think your “soul” chose your previous life, follow this logic back to the beginning of the universe and you will find that your God chose your initial soul, which you didn’t have a say in. And if you do believe that your soul is impermanent, then your soul is just another item under the umbrella of genetics and environment. The soul has no place in modern science and philosophy.

Now onto mind. I earlier stated that you have a will that influences your decisions. I am not claiming that you do not exist, nor that choice (a word I use interchangeably with will) is nonexistent when you make a decision. You exist, and you have agency, but not in the way you thought before reading this paper. Again, the illusion of free will means that you do not have the ability to have chosen differently under the same circumstances.

What is left is a mind with raw experience. Stop for a second and observe your mind as best you can. Notice that you do not choose the next thought that pops into your head. Keep doing this, and you can train yourself to cut through the illusion of free will and experience its lack firsthand. Why would you want to do this? For starters, you will never fault anyone for any harm they cause to you or others. In their shoes, you would have done the exact same thing. As it turns out, putting yourself in another person’s shoes is called compassion, which is the first step solving any sort of problem you have with another human being and to living a more enjoyable and fulfilling life.