Without free will

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What are we?

We continue with the slightly deranged ramblings of Dr Descartes. This time, it's that little matter of free will. If we didn't have free will, then what would be the difference between humans and animals?

What's to say that we have free will at all? I'm not saying that some god is the puppet master and we're the marionettes, but what I am saying is that we don't have as much free will as we like to believe. What we do have is choices. If I had an infinite number of choices open to me every time I made a decision, then I'd have free will. But I don't have such choices because my actions often lead me in very specific directions. If I do A, then B is going to result. The only choice I might have is not to proceed to B, although I might, and probably want to do that anyway.

Or perhaps we always have infinite choices, but we can instantly exclude 99.99999…% of them. For example, I might need more breakfast cereal. My obvious course of action is to go to Metro. But I could also fly to Brazil and buy some there; or sail to Okinawa, stay there for ten minutes, and sail away again without buying anything. In other words, what we do has to be relevant to our concerns, or should be relevant to them. That's not to say that we don't do odd things when our course of action is otherwise obvious.

Humans do have free will of a sort, but it's limited by practical considerations. And I'm not sure that animals, instinctive though their behaviour is, don't have this type of free will themselves. They have choices just as we have choices. A cat might have a sleep, wander around, climb a tree etc., which is a type of free will if we don't insist on free will being a matter of infinite choices. (And should I say "infinite valid choices"?) Likewise, if I'm hungry, I seek something to eat. It may not involved stalking my prey, jumping on it, and playing with it, but I'm responding in the same way a cat would – it's time to eat. I'm not much interested in all those things that I might do as a response beyond deciding where I'm going to eat.

Comments

bezdomny said…
I'm inclined to agree, although I'd add in to the equation such things as the weather, earthquakes, meteorite strikes, the actions of other people, and all other things beyond our control.

And I'd like to state for the record that I just can't stand the rantings of those tossers who insist we have absolute free will.
4 June 2007 at 22:12
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