Free Will Vs Determinism

Exploring the Spectrum of Free Will and Determinism: Insights into Human Consciousness and Choice

Good evening, everyone! In this discussion, we delve into the Free Will versus Determinism debate. Tonight, I will make the case for Free Will.

This was difficult to summarise due to its complexity, and I have made it as short as possible while maintaining the key points. The total presentation is about 10 - 15 minutes divided into 4 parts: Volitional Consciousness, What it means to be Uniquely Human, Psychological Determinism and Sense of Life. 

We will take breaks in between each part for questions and short discussions. Let's begin.

Part 1 - Volitional Consciousness

First, I must ensure we are grounded in the same understanding of consciousness. That one moves from sensation to perception, to abstraction and conception.

For example, that I see. What I see is this cup. And that I can abstract the concepts of white and weight from this cup and the idea of a cup. 

This level of awareness is automatic; it cannot be said to be voluntary. You only need to open your eyes, and biology will determine your conscious experiences.

Beyond this level, however, the brain no longer produces concepts automatically. As soon as the infant is functioning on the level where thinking can be said to have begun—we are no longer dealing with a cognitive process that functions automatically.

Whether or not the infant, the young man, or the adult will think or not is an act of choice that he has to make. It is not a function forced upon him or determined or necessitated by his nature.

In order to think, you have to do something. You have to generate effort. You have to focus your mind. You have to choose to set the mental machinery in motion. You have to decide to seek to understand that which is not immediately given, that which is not self-evident, that which is not inescapably there in your immediate sensory experience—but, rather, that which you must reach by a process of conceptual reasoning.

That choice, once made, does not continue to direct man's mind unceasingly after that, with no further effort required. Just as the state of full mental focus must be initiated volitionally, so it must be maintained volitionally, too.

The choice to think must be reaffirmed in the face of every new issue and problem. The decision to be in focus yesterday will not compel you to be in focus today. The decision to focus on one question will not compel you to focus on another. The decision to pursue a certain value does not guarantee that you will exert the mental effort needed to achieve it. 

In any hour of your life, you are free to suspend the function of your consciousness, abandon effort, and let your mind drift in passivity. Or, you are free to maintain only a partial focus, grasping that which comes easily to your understanding and declining to struggle for that which does not.

You all know what it means to be in a state of kind of vague floating or dreaming, thinking about nothing, and then suddenly to attend to some particular issue—mentally, to attend, to focus, to aim your cognitive faculty, as it were, in a certain direction, to say to yourself, "Now, grasp this. Make this intelligible. Understand this." 

A simple example is one you encounter every morning when you wake up, and you're a bit drowsy, and you feel as though your consciousness is somewhat splintered, perhaps, for a few seconds or minutes—or hours—and, at some point, presumably, you say, in effect, "Well, now, what do I have to do today?" And you begin to think over what is ahead of you this day, what you have to attend to. That's an act you can catch easily; it is the act of focusing your mind and making yourself fully conscious.

Part 2 - Uniquely Human

Man's unique biological character—or one of the unique characteristics, biologically, of man—is precisely this self-regulatory power over your own consciousness.

Its context in biology is necessary to appreciate volitional consciousness as a distinctly human faculty.

A fundamental characteristic of the actions of all living organisms, as distinguished from inanimate matter, is that the actions of living entities are goal-directed. They are self-regulated actions moving toward an end or goal. 

Obviously, where we deal with unconscious—or, more precisely, non-conscious—organisms like plants, we don't speak of the goal as something the plant holds since it has no mind. But, looking from the outside, we can see that there is a logic governing all of the actions of the plant, the tree, or the shrub. 

In biology, this is a well-known phenomenon. Our bodies operate on this principle, with complex internal processes working tirelessly towards one goal: preserving life. This isn't random; it's a highly structured, goal-directed action inherent to all living organisms.

The transition from plants to animals introduces a new complexity in self-regulation. Consciousness becomes the regulator of an animal's actions. For example, a cat navigating around a box in a room simply demonstrates how consciousness guides the actions of the total organism.

Animal consciousness, though passive, responds to external stimuli and guides movement, a significant advancement from plant life. However, the leap from animals to humans introduces a new dimension: the mind. Humans don't just have consciousness; we have a reasoning, thinking mind, elevating the complexity of our self-regulatory actions.

A pet hears a sound and jerks its head in that direction. Animals are entirely dependent upon and tied to the cues in their sensory fields. They don't think up problems to solve. They don't say, "What will I think about today?" And they certainly don't say, "I'd rather not think about that today. It's too upsetting." Their consciousnesses are passive reactors to the stimuli that they receive. 

What sets humans apart is our volitional consciousness. We can direct our consciousness; in effect, we can think about and decide what to think about and even choose to not engage in thought. 

This volitional control is the core of free will. Human beings are able to decide the primary goal our consciousness pursues – to seek understanding or to evade it. This choice – to think or not to think – is the essence of human free will, distinguishing us fundamentally from other forms of life.

Part 3 - Psychological Determinism

The Nature of Psychological Freedom

This type of psychological freedom does not mean that man is omniscient. It does not mean that man is infallible. It does not mean that man can never make mistakes. It does not mean that man is impervious to all external circumstances, which is obviously absurd.

Substantial events like wars or economic crises can impact our lives, and we often can't control these things. I'm focusing on the power of a person's mind and freedom to think. This freedom is important because, depending on the situation and what a person knows, the way they think plays a significant role in shaping who they are and their life's direction.

The Concept of Free Will as a Causal Primary

Choosing to focus or not is an essential decision that's different from other choices, like picking between two movies. This ability to decide whether to focus is a vital part of being human. It's a natural ability we all have. If you wonder, "Why does one person choose to think and another not to?" and find it hard to believe that it's just their own choice without any outside force making them do it, you might be thinking that every mental decision is just a response to something else. But it's essential to question this idea. It suggests that nothing can originate action or motion.

Psychological Determinism and its Fallacies

Psychological determinism asserts that all aspects of human behaviour and thought, including actions, desires, and decisions, are entirely controlled by external forces, leaving no room for free will or personal choice. This perspective suggests that people are passive beings, merely reacting to various pressures rather than actively making choices. 

According to this view, a person's responses and beliefs in any situation are predetermined, much like a particle of dust is directed by physical forces. Essentially, it denies any real autonomy or self-responsibility in humans, comparing them to inanimate objects like stones, albeit affected by more complex factors.

Environmentalism and its Limitations

Environmental determinism claims that a person's background and environment predominantly shape their character, values, actions, and thoughts. Proponents view individuals as mere recorders, passively absorbing and replaying what their surroundings dictate, including influences from parents, teachers, and peers. 

This theory often struggles to explain the origin of new ideas, sometimes even denying their existence.

However, this view overlooks a crucial aspect: while the environment provides material for thought, it does not dictate the content of a person's thinking. Experiences and perceptions don't automatically lead to specific beliefs or convictions. It's not a passive, deterministic process. Instead, it requires an active mental effort, a process of thinking where individuals analyze and interpret their perceptions. Therefore, a person's life and character are shaped not merely by what they perceive in their environment but by how they actively think about and process these perceptions.

The Contradiction in Determinist Philosophy

The determinist concept of "mind" entails a crucial contradiction—specifically, an epistemological (knowing) contradiction. It is a self-refuting or self-invalidating theory. I want to direct your attention to the nature of this contradiction in the determinist position, a contradiction implicit in any variety of determinism, whether the alleged determining forces are physical, psychological, environmental, or divine. It wouldn't matter whether you hold that man is controlled and determined by the gods or his genes or his toilet training or his socio-economic environment or background or position. This contradiction is common to all of them.

The Impossibility of Knowledge under Determinism

Psychological determinism suggests that everything a person thinks, believes, or decides is an inevitable outcome of previous conditions and influences, making free thought impossible. However, this view poses a significant contradiction regarding acquiring and validating knowledge.

Firstly, humans are not inherently omniscient or infallible. This means they must actively seek and verify knowledge. If ideas and beliefs are predetermined, individuals cannot freely evaluate them against reality, leading to an inability to distinguish true from false ideas. Knowledge requires correct identification of reality, necessitating free judgment and reasoning. If a person's judgment is predetermined, they cannot effectively discern truth from falsehood because they cannot validate their own theories, and so they cannot claim their theory as true.

The concept of "logic" is possible only to a volitional consciousness. An automatic consciousness could have no need of it and could not conceive of it. The concepts of "logic," "thought," and "knowledge" are not applicable to machines. A machine does not reason. It performs the actions its builder sets it to perform, and those actions alone. If it is set to register that 2 + 2 = 4, it does so. If it is set to register that 2 + 2 = 5, it does so. It has no power to correct the orders and information given to it.

Now, there is one common confusion in many people's minds that allows them to grant some validity to the thesis of psychological determinism. And that is the confused and entirely mistaken notion that the Law of Causality requires a commitment to psychological determinism. It does not.

The actions of an entity are determined by the nature of the entity that acts. It is the nature of the entity that determines the actions possible to it, and, in any given context or situation, it is the nature of the entity that determines what the entity will do. One of the unique characteristics, biologically, of man is precisely this self-regulatory power over his own consciousness.

Aristotle correctly observed that one of the distinguishing characteristics of living organisms, as separate from non-living organisms, is, as he said, that in living organisms, the source or origin of their motion lies within themselves. If a plant grows, it's not because something outside pushed it. Its principle of motion lies within itself.

Part 4 - Sense of Life

Example 1

If, for instance, a child is brought up by irrational parents who give him a bewildering, frightening, and contradictory impression of reality, he may decide that all human beings, by their nature, are incomprehensible and dangerous to him. If he arrests his thinking at this point, and if in later years he never attempts to think this issue through again, never attempts to question his chronic feeling of anxiety and helplessness, he can spend the rest of his life in a state of embittered paralysis.

But such does not have to be his fate. If he continues to struggle with this problem, or, as he grows older, if he decides to think about it, to reexamine it, to consider the newer, wider evidence available to him, if, to put the issue more simply, he decides to preserve an acute mental focus, he can discover that he has made an unwarranted generalization, and he can then revise it into a fully reasoned and conscious conviction.

Example 2

Another child in the same circumstances may draw different conclusions. He may decide that all human beings are unreliable and evil, and that he will beat them at their own game, he will act as ruthlessly and dishonestly as possible, to hurt them before they hurt him. Again, he can revise this conclusion later, in the light of wider evidence, if he chooses to think about it, if he chooses to remain in focus. If he doesn't, he will become a scoundrel or a criminal—not because his parents were irrational, but because he defaulted on the responsibility of remaining in focus, of forming his convictions in full consciousness, and of checking his conclusions against the facts of reality.

Example 3

A third child in the same circumstances may decide that his parents are wrong, that they are unjust and unfair, or at least that they do not act understandably, and that he must not act as they do. He may suffer at home, but keep looking for evidence of better human behavior among relatives or neighbors or in books and movies. But the child will draw an enormous advantage out of his misfortune, which he will not realize 'til many, many years later. He will have laid the foundations of an inviolate self-esteem.

Example 4 (If you have time)

If an adolescent grows up in a neighborhood where crime flourishes and cynically is accepted as the normal, he can, abdicating the independence of his judgment, allow his character to be shaped in the image of the prevailing values and become a criminal himself. Or, choosing to think, choosing to remain aware, choosing to go on looking at the facts of reality and to make sense out of what he sees, he will come to the realization of the irrationality and humiliating self-degradation of the people who accept a criminal mode of existence.

Of any value offered to him as the right and any assertion offered to him as the true, a human being is free to ask "why?"—and that "why?" is the threshold that the beliefs of others cannot cross without his consent.

But what of the individual who does appear to be the product of his background, the pawn of his conditioning? Well, let's take the social worker's favorite example. Let's consider the case of the boy who, brought up in a bad neighborhood, becomes a criminal. What are the internal mental processes that lead this poor chap into a life of crime?

Very briefly, the pattern goes like this. In the actions of a boy who allows himself in this manner to be shaped by his environment, an obvious motive activating him is the desire to swim with the current. What, in psychological terms, does this expression mean? What does it mean to "swim with the current"?

The boy is living in a neighborhood where crime and hoodlumism is rampant, and he swims with the current. Well, how does this happen? To swim with the current proceeds from the desire to escape the effort and responsibility of initiating one's own course of action. In order to choose one's own actions, one has, of course, to choose one's own goals—and to do that, one has to choose one's own values—and to do that, one has to think, one has to be in focus, one has to go on looking and judging. Thinking is the first, and the basic, responsibility that such a boy rejects.

And because he doesn't choose to think and has, therefore, no long-range goals or standards, he is left at the mercy of the impulses of the immediate moment. He is forced to pursue short-range, immediately available goals, and to seek immediately available pleasures. And this leads him, in the logic of his course, to accept whatever values are offered to him by whatever social group happens to surround him. To swim with the current, one has to accept the ocean or the swamp or the rapids or the cesspool or the abyss toward which that particular current is rushing.

Having no values or standards of his own, the boy will want to swim. He will want to follow any course of action ready-made for him by others. He will want to belong. If the boys in the neighborhood form a gang at the corner poolroom, he will join. If they start robbing people, he will start robbing people. If they begin to murder, he will murder. What moves him? His feelings. His feelings are all he has left, once he has abandoned his mind.

He does not join the gang by a conscious, reasoned decision. He doesn't think about and decide it's the logical thing to do. No! He joins because he feels like joining. He does not follow the gang because he thinks they are right. No! He follows because he feels like following.

If his mother, for example, objects and tries to argue with him, to persuade him to quit the hoodlums, he does not weigh her arguments and conclude that she is wrong. He just doesn't feel like thinking about it, one way or the other. If, at some point, he begins to fear that the gang may be going too far, if he is anxious at the prospect of becoming a murderer, he realizes that the alternative is to break with his friends and be left on his own. He does not weigh the advantages or disadvantages of being left on his own. No, he chooses blindly to stick with the gang because, at the prospect of being alone, at the prospect of independence, he feels terror.

He may see, across the river, or just a few blocks away, people who lead a totally different kind of life, and boys of his own age who somehow did not become criminals. But this does not raise in his mind the question of whether a better kind of life may be possible to him, it does not prompt him to inquire or investigate, because he feels terror at the unknown. He feels safe in his surroundings. They are the familiar and the known. If he asks himself what it is that terrifies him about breaking with his background, well, he would answer, in effect: "Aw, I don't know nobody out there, and nobody knows me." In logic, this isn't an answer or an explanation, because there is nothing objectively terrifying in that statement—but it satisfies him, because he feels an overwhelming, unanalyzed dread of loneliness, and feelings are his only absolute, the absolute never to be questioned.

And if, at the age of twenty, he is dragged to jail to await execution for some monstrously bloody and senselessly wanton crime, he will scream that he could not help it, and that he never had a chance. Will he scream it because it is true? No. He will scream it, because he feels it. In the sense opposite of that which he intends, there is one element of truth in his scream. Given his basic policy of anti-thought, he could not help it, and he never did have a chance. Neither does any other human being who moves through life on that policy. But it is not true that he, or any other human being, could not help running from the necessity to think, and could not help blindly riding on his feelings.

On every day of this boy's life, and at every crucial turning-point, the possibility of thinking about his actions was open to him. The evidence on which to base a change in his policy was available to him, and he evaded it. He didn't care to think. If, at every turning-point, he had thought carefully and conscientiously, and had simply reached the wrong conclusions, he would be more justified in crying that he could not help it. But it is not helplessly bewildered, conscientious thinkers who fill reform schools and murder one another on street corners, through an unfortunate error in logic.

The policy on which this boy proceeded is the policy on which many people proceed. He perhaps carried it to more of an extreme—or existed in an environment where that policy would prove more disastrous. Not that he never thinks. Oh, no. Everybody thinks some of the time. His policy is, "I'll think when I feel like thinking. It's an unfair charge that some people never think at all. Nobody is ever out of focus all the time." When we say a person is "out of focus," characteristically, we're talking about a person whose feelings largely determine whether he's in focus or out of focus, certainly not reality. But thinking is not a luxury in which man indulges, if and when his feelings permit it. The relationship is the opposite. Feelings take over and assert control, if and when thinking is suspended. And this is the manner in which men can be "determined" by their environment.

If a man chooses not to think, if he chooses to escape from the effort of focus and the responsibility of judgment, he is left at the mercy of his feelings, of his immediate subconscious reactions, and these will be at the mercy of the outside forces impinging upon him, at the mercy or whoever and whatever is around him. In this state, he is a helpless zombie, passively being shaped by his environment. But he did not have to get into that state, and he does not have to remain in it. He still has the power to focus, to think, to question; and if he chooses not to, then it is he who has turned himself into the determinist view of man—that is, into an empty mold, waiting to be filled; into a will-less robot, waiting to be taken over by any environment and any conditioners.

Conclusion

To conclude, most human beings, as I have said, are not unequivocally opposed to the policy of thinking. It would be more correct to say that thinking, for most men, is sort of an emergency measure. It's what you try when everything else has failed, which is usually much too late. It's a sort of a last resort. The first resort is to act on your immediate impulses feelings habits, or advice that somebody gives you. If that proves inadequate to the whole situation, or if it mangles you, at some point, some men decide implicitly, "Well, just for the hell of it, I'll try to think my way out of this situation." At which, much of the time, they find they can't—and small wonder. Can't, in the time necessary, that is. They could, but what could have been a task of minutes or weeks becomes a task of agonizing years, if it's undertaken at all, because they don't have the knowledge which they should have to help them in this moment, the knowledge that would have come from the thinking they didn't do. 

The unfortunate state of affairs is that psychologists, when they see this sort of spectacle, should be the first to point out the deadly danger of the policy of men who try to exist with as little thinking as they can get away with. But much of psychology, instead of criticizing this policy, instead of pointing out that it's a sign on the road to disease and disaster—no, instead, they say, "Such is human nature. Man is only peripherally and marginally a rational being." They say that it's far more relevant to say that he's a feeling being, and they point to all of the wrecks in their offices as evidence. But it's not in a therapist's office that you find out what human nature is, and you don't point to neurotics and psychotics as examples of normal human functioning or behavior.