Notes on free will

Reflecting on one of the most enduring topics

I think the reason why free will is such a tricky and difficult topic to discuss is that it’s probably the question in philosophy that requires the making of the point of “why are we here” because either we have free will or not, it ultimately refers to human nature at its core. The free will debate as going on for thousands of years and I’m not really sure if it’s making any progress. In this way, I would measure progress as if philosophers and people thinking about the issue of free will start agreeing more on their opinions. This means they would be converging to the truth, and since they are seeking the same truth, they must start by agreeing more over time, of course they could take different paths. I never really thought about this question and I think the default answer is “yes, we have free will” everyone wants to assume we have free will. Denying that we have free will, seems, in a way, rejecting human uniqueness. How could it be that the human race after all has the same destiny as any other species even though we are clearly special in the way that we understand everything possible to be understood and we explain everything that can be explained, we’re universal explainers. And not to mention the obvious distinctions (consciousness, etc). Either way, if we have free will or not, it seems to me that we’ll never know and there will be almost no progress happening among philosophers exploring this issue. We still have to do our decisions in the end of the day, if go vote to the next elections, we can think of reasons why we would vote for a particular candidate and for reasons why we wouldn’t vote for that same candidate. But at the end, we’ll still gonna have to make the decision of who to vote for vote for. The same happens if you’re gonna to a restaurant and the waiter asks what you wanna have, you won’t just say “oh waiter, I’m a determinist, let’s see what happens!” you need to make up your mind. Since I’m very interested in meditation, I looked up some arguments that the meditation circles seem to defend, including also the opinion of Sam Harris who actually has a book only on free will! So one of the claims that has the most concise among meditators is that the self is an illusion, it doesn’t exist. Though we perceive a sense of self that’s just a mere illusion. If you take time to meditate, you’ll rapidly notice that there’s no thinker inside your head, or an “I” (neuroscience also comproves this), and your head is rather a theatre where thoughts arise randomly rather than a control center generating them. In this perspective, what we call free will might just be consciousness witnessing decisions that perhaps might have been made unconsciously (in this process of thoughts arise randomly). On the other side of this argument that introspection leads to the realisation that there’s no self, we have Ayn Rand who said the exact opposite. She argued that basically that introspection and looking inside will always be a proof of free will because as she said we are aware of our ability to focus our attention, we can choose what to think about. I do think that we have some power over our thoughts, for instance that single act of being writing this is generating thoughts in my mind about this free will issue. Just like if I were reading a paper on capitalism, I would be thinking of capitalism. So we do have this little power of directing our mind to what we want to see the more of, but inside of the topic e.g capitalism, my thoughts could be totally random. So, then the question doesn’t becomes about if we have the power of directing our mind to thoughts related to something we’re interested in and becomes if the act of “directing our mind to thoughts related to something we’re interested” is free or not. Of course that in this particular situation, we have the illusion that yes, I choose to be reading this paper but then we just could be endlessly asking “did you?” and we’ll never really get an answer. It’s also important to notice that the explanation “it’s an illusion” is a very bad explanation (or better, isn’t an explanation at all). It’s very easy to vary, you can apply that same explanation to everything else and it doesn’t specifically accounts for what was proposed to account for