User:Brews ohare/Freewill

Free will

Pfhorrest has famed the present Intro around constraints. Given our intuition that we can make decisions, it seems natural to suppose the topic of freely making decisions would lead to discussions about what interferes with that freedom. From a common-sense standpoint things like addiction, brainwashing, inhibition, where they arise, how they can be dealt with, and so forth, would be the content of this article.

Unfortunately, this kind of limitation upon our freedom is of almost no importance to philosophers. Rather, their attention is directed to consistency with the rest of our knowledge. So the early Greeks noticed that in nature things happened in two ways: some things always happened when other things happened first, like a stone falling to the ground when it is dropped. Other things were acts of God, or rather the gods, and occurred more or less "out of the blue". So where did our decisions fit in?

This same dilemma remains today: the phenomena explained by science occur according to laws, some mathematically formulated, and these laws suggest the future, while not to the most minute detail, in very large measure is tied to the past. Our brains appear to be a subject suitable to be studied by by science, so events occurring in the brain are seemingly governed by discoverable laws, possibly similar to those governing what science has already found. If our thoughts are governed by events in our brains, then they are governed by these laws too, and if so thoughts are not initiated by our own decisions, but by earlier events of an impersonal nature. We do know that there is a subconscious that influences our decisions, but we are not inclined intuitively to put all control out of our hands. We intuit that there is some free will, although it is somewhat bounded.

A way toward some freedom is to suppose our thoughts are not entirely a result of activity confined inside our own brain. One obvious point is that we are influenced by our culture and what happens in our brain when placed in some situation varies from one culture to another, and varies also as our culture evolves. For example, in earthquake prone regions we construct buildings differently today than decades ago, because our culture has taken our understanding of earthquakes to a more practical level. Obviously, science helped to uncover these principles, but science does not dictate that we research this phenomenon, nor that we use what we learn.

So from whence comes these cultural activities, and does this question bear upon free will? This question is connected to the interplay between individuals and the plasticity of their culture, fields studied by historians, novelists, sociobiologists, and even philosophers. My guess is that there is far to go before this interplay is understood, and the question of free will awaits further development and a better understanding of how individual creativity and social development are coupled.