| RolStoppable said: I've thought about this some more today, so here's what crossed my mind. The proponents of "free will is a myth" use science as their proof. Science is taken as the truth because it provides an explanation for why things are as they are. When I was in school, I was taught that the human tongue can discern four different tastes: sweet, sour, salty and bitter. This was the scientific truth. Nowadays science says that there are five tastes, so what does it mean? Back then when it was only four tastes, there was no better explanation, so it was accepted as the truth of how it works because scientists had agreed upon that. This example can be taken further by looking at the areas of the tongue that recognize the different tastes which nowadays is a very different picture from it was back then. Back to free will, when a man betrays his wife by having sex with another woman, the proponents of "free will is a myth" would say that the man ultimately had no choice despite weighing option A (don't do it) and option B (do it) before committing the act. They would say option B won out despite option A being considered the better course of action by the man, therefore free will does not exist. I stand by it that that is nonsense. My explanation is that option B won out because the man allowed his instinct to take control. Another man might go with option A when facing the exact same choice and my explanation for that is willpower. Not everyone has it to the same degree, but it most certainly exists. Willpower goes hand in hand with free will. Yes, people can choose their behavior. Saying that free will is a myth... well, the scientific proof for that assertion is merely the best explanation science has come up so far for how our brains work, how humans work. It doesn't mean that the explanation is correct, just like the scientific work on the human tongue that I've been taught in school wasn't correct. The explanation that people cannot choose their behavior is idiotic at a fundamental level already (fundamental = considering only two options, not a more complex scenario). When a man betrayed his wife with another woman and his excuse to the wife is that he had no choice and may even point to "free will is a myth", the answer he's going to get is: "Of course you had the choice!" And the woman is right. The man had the choice and no amount of talk of neurons and the like is going to change that. The reason why I think that this is a good example is because it deals with one of the most basic instincts of humans, so people have to make such a choice on a frequent basis, and they most certainly can make that choice. |
It's not only in science that this concept of free will is assessed. Philosophy has pretty much rejected this view, or at least failed to provide sufficient support for it.
3.3 Do We Have Free Will?
A recent trend is to suppose that agent causation accounts capture, as well as possible, our prereflective idea of responsible, free action. But the failure of philosophers to work the account out in a fully satisfactory and intelligible form reveals that the very idea of free will (and so of responsibility) is incoherent (Strawson 1986) or at least inconsistent with a world very much like our own (Pereboom 2001). Smilansky (2000) takes a more complicated position, on which there are two ‘levels’ on which we may assess freedom, ‘compatibilist’ and ‘ultimate’. On the ultimate level of evaluation, free will is indeed incoherent. (Strawson, Pereboom, and Smilansky all provide concise defenses of their positions in Kane 2002.)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/
If you can get your hands on Galen Strawson's The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility you would understand better why free will is so incoherent.
