Freely Chosen Thoughts on Will?

Freely Chosen Thoughts on Will?


I saw an episode of Law and Order where the point of contention was whether the will to rape is inherited, that is, genetic, and not in control of the rapist, or that one chooses to rape, as an act of free will, and hence is responsible for the act.
“Not his fault”, from one side; “Responsibility”, from the other.
Does genetics affect freedom of the will and if so, how much? I guess this is a question where “free will” needs a good definition, which unfortunately, I am not going to provide.

Let me begin by saying that I don’t really know what is meant by free will. I had heard the phrase and thought I knew what it meant but when asked to explain it, I fell silent.
When I decided to put on a CD of The Dixie Chicks, was it an act of free will or was it predetermined? Is this even an appropriate use of the expression, “free will”?
I have heard free will discussed in the context of cause and effect. Each link in a cause/effect chain is determined by the previous link. Each instant of behavior gives the initial conditions that determine what happens at the next instant. Or maybe it is the entire history of the chain up to and including the instant of “˜now’ that determines what happens in the “next” instant.
Was my choice to put on a CD of “The Dixie Chicks” determined at birth? Maybe it was determined at the beginning of the universe. Or was my choice of The Dixie Chicks the result of choosing randomly among my CDs? Is there some element of probability in free will? Does the operation of will belong in macro-quantum mechanics?
Trying to remedy my state of ignorance, I checked out free will in Wikipedia. Apparently there are as many ways that the will can be free as there are philosophers. I was soon swamped with versions of free will and after reading a few, I decided that enough was enough. Well, something decided, by hook or by crook, that enough was enough...sometime.
In a kind of straw poll, all the people I’ve talked to lately about the freedom of the will had a different opinion but all of them said that they thought there was some kind of free will. Most of the discussion was about the possible ways that the will might be free.

It seems to me that any concept of a free will would incorporate a choice, and a choice would require a “something” to make the choice. But does “something” evaluate and freely decide or is “something” preprogrammed? Or is there “something else”? Does “something else” program “something”, deciding to tell “something” the instructions to pass on?
Is there a “first decider” and on what would a “first decider” base its decisions?

I have heard that a certain spot in the brain lights up about half a second before the subject of the experiment is aware that she is going to reach for a glass of water. I’m not implying that the glowing spot is the “something” but evidently some kind of activity was going on before the thought occurred to her to reach for the glass. At the time when she thought she was making a choice, it had already been made. Perhaps the thoughts that we are aware of are how “something” puts its decisions into action.

I remember watching news reels during The War and thinking that the bombs falling on German and Japanese cities were falling on kids just like me. I wondered about the fact that I was born in Boise instead of Berlin or Tokyo. I marveled at my luck.
In later years I looked back at that feeling and realized that as a kid I had automatically assumed that the “something” that was me could have been born anywhere and I wondered how that choice was made, if at all.
It is that “something” that could have been born in Mongolia that is in question. It is the place where the will resides. It is this “something” that many philosophies claim doesn’t exist. Some say the “something” is a meme. Some say it is the soul. Some say it is the unconscious, a cop out if there ever was one. But whatever the “something” is, pretty much everybody starts off life thinking that they have one; thinking they have a “something” that is them.
This feeling of self-identity is very strong. Buddhists go to considerable effort to understand the meaning of “There is no I”.
So the “something” is there. We may not understand it but it’s there.

I don’t think it’s possible for the brain to understand the brain. A brain can only understand something simpler that itself. We will never understand the “something” that makes us feel that there is an “I”. Not in this world anyway, at least not this month.
It is my hypothesis that the will makes decisions, determined or free, and that the aware mind is logically unable to understand that which controls it, that is, the will.

A lot of people try to understand the brain by likening it to a computer and I question this analogy. The computer is discrete and does not have a free will.

I think the difference between a computer and a brain lies in the difference between discrete and continuous. It is more or less clear what happens in a computer when decisions are made. Even though computers can get petty complicated, so complicated that one person finds it hard to grasp the entire system, they aren’t as complicated as the brain. I would think that the number of possible connections in a brain is beyond human comprehension.
When a number gets so large that it is completely beyond human understanding I will call it humanly infinite.
A discrete collection of dots looks like just a bunch of dots but as the density of dots gets larger and larger the discrete looks continuous and may even be a recognizable picture. The discrete passes to a state I call humanly continuous.
When we pass from the finite to the humanly infinite or from the discrete to the humanly continuous, I think we pick up unanswerable questions.

As I write these words, it is my perception that I have the feeling that I am writing these words. Sometimes words come to my mind and I write them down. Sometimes I write words that my fingers seem to write by themselves, skipping the mind step. I have a sense that I am writing about free will and the words that come to mind are appropriate. I choose between two or three different ways of expressing a”¦thought? and either choose a rendition or dump the idea entirely. I have made a decision. I have used my will freely “¦or have I?
A little exercise that piques my wonder is listening to myself talk as I do it. Where do the words come from? I don’t think out each sentence before I say it. I stand amazed as words pour out of my mouth, seemingly from out of nowhere. It is much like the feeling I have when I realize that the objects I think are “out there” when I see them are really inside my head.
The actors who say their lines poorly sound as if they are reciting words that have been memorized. Good actors sound like the words are the product of the instant.
We can’t understand that “something” because it is humanly infinite and humanly continuous with respect to what might be called the reasoning part of the brain which is discrete and finite.

Is there a God? This question is about something which, if God exists, is humanly continuous and as such has no answer in a discrete thinking brain.
Absolutes often involve opinions of concepts that our discrete, reasoning brain can’t understand. “Nothing” is an example. I find the Big Bang theory hard to understand because I have to deal with the concept of “nothing”. What does it mean for “nothing” to exist? How do I describe “nothing”?
If the universe goes back forever, then the universe has no beginning. I find it hard to bend my discrete, overtly thinking brain around that.

I have read that in ancient Greece, the highest virtue was moderation. If we look at Homer’s Iliad as a morality play, the reason Achilleus had to die was that he had sinned when he went on an extreme in killing spree after Hector killed Patroklos.
I tend to follow this Greek philosophy of moderation when I consider my opinion of the freedom of the will. I don’t think that the act of pushing my glasses back up on my nose is determined by fate. On the other hand, when a doc hits my knee with a rubber hammer I don’t seem to have much choice in whether to kick or not. A free will lies between those bounds which more or less implies that talking about free will is for late hour bull sessions in the dorm.


I’ve looked at will from both sides now
From bound to free but still somehow
It’s will’s illusion I recall
I really don’t know will at all.
(a la Joni Mitchell)