free will

Day 3406, Do you know that they say? 2

Daily picture, Do you know that they say?

Do you know that they say?

They say that it is hard to find the place in yourself where the decisions you make come from, why did you choose this over the other? If you want to scratch the back of your head, you might feel that you just decided that, but do you have control of all the movements that your arm makes to reach that itchy spot? You can say yes and insist that you have the control to move your hand to another place at any moment. And that might be true, but do you consciously control all the muscles in your arm to guide it to its place? No, of course not, just like you don’t control your heartbeat or your bowel movements. What I try to say is that we feel some control over what we want to do with our bodies, but for the most part, we have no control over it. We walk everywhere without ever thinking about how we do it; it all happens unconsciously. But is it not possible that even this last bit of control, the decision you feel you make, is also an automated process that includes this feeling of control? Benjamin Libet is famous for the research he conducted in the 1980s, which showed that our brain begins making decisions up to 10 seconds before we are conscious of it.  So if you answer a question with yes or no, the research can show you that your decision was already made before you got the chance to answer a certain way, and you get the answer presented to you just before you are conscious of it  We are like the child with a fake steering wheel sitting on the passenger side of a car, steering in the direction the car goes just a second after the car changes direction, and we felt the power of control. This research has been repeated ever since, and it is clear that this happens. The debate these days is more about the consequences of it.

Just think about it, but realize that any opinions you have about it are formed before you are conscious of it. If your first reaction is no, impossible, then you have to realize that you have to compete with scientists who have studied our brains for years, and that “you” can only make decisions with the knowledge you have available. If you are not up for that task but still can’t believe it, then I suggest you get some new information in your system so your unconsciousness can form a better opinion for the you, you feel you are*.

*It is hard to wrap your mind around it, but try to think of yourself as your self, as a feature like the skin you have. The skin also changes over time, and you have little control over this feature besides some moisturizer you can use. You definitely have a self and a personality (it separates you from the others around you, just as your skin does), but this seems not to be a static entity. You might perceive it as a constant, but it is more like the sea where you swim in, and your self is the sea, constantly changing but seemingly not, and with no chores in sight, you don’t feel you are drifting.

Day 3403, free will

Daily picture, Quotes

“In order to prove there’s free will, you have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all these biological precursors. It may be possible to sidestep that with some subtle philosophical arguments, but you can’t with anything known to science.”

Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

Day 3156, conundrum.

Daily picture, My thoughts

I am in a conundrum. I don’t believe that we have free will. What I mean by this is that we are born into certain circumstances that determine who we are for the rest of our lives. If you are a curious toddler, you will probably be curious for the rest of your life, especially when it is encouraged. If you don’t like learning history at school because it didn’t interest you, you might never pick up a history book in your free time when you are an adult. We are all different but stay the same for most of our lives. Remember your old friend, the one you have not seen in 30 years, there’s not much changed underneath besides the clothes and 30 years of history they wear. 

So, I don’t believe in free will and that it is possible to really change another person. We are all a certain way; we have a character and a personality that is recognizable and belongs exclusively to us. We don’t change easily, like our eating habits or how to quit smoking, though that last one borders on an addictive personality that you will never get rid of; you can only replace this bad habit with another in most cases.

There is no free will, so I am doomed to try to figure out through study how we function and find a method to change the other. I am unsure if I want to change the other; many philosophers study life for the sake of studying and acquiring knowledge. I tell myself that I do it just for fun, like an addiction; I know theoretically that I can’t change others because we are determined, and I also live a life. I have a girlfriend, colleagues, and family, and am a boss. None of these people listen to what I want them to do. They just oblige me sometimes till I am around the corner again. 

I cannot tell someone to have some discipline because discipline helped me through some rough spots in life if these people I want to help have no discipline. I cannot tell a coworker to be more accurate when they have never been accurate; I can only find another job for them to do. 

The funny thing is that these kinds of awareness were already there three or four thousand years ago. People have always tried to find ways to make all of us better by offering wise tips on how to live a good life. They did this through secular means, and some religions even try to improve society here on Earth through helpful tips and tricks. And we live better together now than three thousand years ago, not by much, but we do. But I don’t think it comes because of the so-called lessons we have learned from history through actively studying it, with conclusions that we can use to teach the next generations. I think we learned like we do when we live in a new house, when we go to the toilet at night in the dark and bump our toes and knees at random corners. After a while, we avoid the corners while we sleepwalk to where we can relieve ourselves. 

Humanity learns to walk like a baby does, and what can you teach a baby? You can only encourage it with gestures and sounds because the rest has no meaning to them.  

Day 3090, let go.

Daily picture, My thoughts

Is it possible to ever let go? To untie yourself from yourself. To not think the way you always do. Turn a switch and change, even if only for a second or two.  

Of course not. Every reaction has an action before it; change in your life does not happen in a vacuum and can not be commanded. It is impossible not to be yourself, and even if you take a leap, you will most certainly land on the other side as yourself again. 

If you want to change, you could change your surroundings. Meeting new people is often an excellent way to confirm your choices or to get infected by new ones. And when you’re stuck in one place, alone, then read a book, one you wouldn’t usually choose, one recommended by someone you respect or who rubs you the wrong way.

Changing your mind takes work. When you are 16, you do it every week; when you are old, maybe just the second before you die. And if it is not your age that holds you from changing or changing too much, it might be your family, friends, the person sleeping next to you, or the country you live in. 

But just moving to another country or divorcing is not the cure that brings you change. The things around you might change, but do they change enough? Do you fall in love again with that person you imagined you had met before? Do you wake up next to the same person because you see all of them like that? A thing. 

Change is difficult, even if you want it. Not many people want to put in the effort, and we expect change to happen by demanding it from others or through shortcuts we want to believe. They say that we are formed for a large part in our early years. When you are three, change is happening all the time, and it just happened. You get moved around, presented with food you don’t know, and wear clothes you have never seen before. All this change was forced upon you and hopefully done with love, making you feel good. Now, you have to do it all alone, and you don’t know how and stick with what you know. Longing for someone who tells you, but most of the time, that is you; the choice is often between what you already know all too well.  

It is like the free will problem. If we had it, we could all just change our minds and change. We are all stuck in a particular past and body, and these two determine for the most who we are. Making unexpected friends or reading a new book might notch you off, off your trajectory, but knowing that you encounter something new is the big challenge. You have to learn to recognize what is new, and the best way to do that is to keep it close and not at a distance.





Day 3064, do I open the door.

Daily picture, My thoughts

I don’t think that we have a free will. I believe it is essential that we act like we have one, and our nature and evolution have made it so that we all have the illusion that we have free will. There are many arguments against this idea, and as many in favor, I just ask you to look around and in yourself. If you look at us as a collection of inherited traits, the parts in you that come from your mother, father, and the rest of the family before them.  That’s the “mechanical” part of you, including the brain, that will do most of the work once you start living. During this living, you will be exposed to your culture and the values and morals of your surroundings. You can have a wide range of influences, but you will never be influenced by everything. You will be unique but, at the same time, a unique representation of your experiences. Your experiences will make you react to what the world will throw at you. You feel that you have decided to vote left or right, but your past, the clothes you wear, and the friends you have have already decided your path, your choice. Your choices are your surroundings reflecting in you and who you are without conscious interference.  

All the arguments going around inside you for why you choose the way you do are no explanations for why you consciously choose but for why you seem to have chosen.  Think about what you do when you lift your arm. You only see it move, but many decisions are made hidden from you. All the muscles and different signals have to start moving without your conscious awareness. You think you move your arm, but at most, you have given it an order. The thoughts you have and the words you speak are more or less like that. You only become aware of what you think after your brain has done a lot of unconscious processing. You might order your brain to think but it does most of the work for you, without you. 

We’re a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.
 Anthony Burges

 

Day 2938, losing.

Daily picture, Quotes

Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic, in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible. There is no telling how much I might change in the future. Just as one wouldn’t draw a lasting conclusion about oneself on the basis of a brief experience of indigestion, one needn’t do so on the basis of how one has thought or behaved for vast stretches of time in the past. A creative change of inputs to the system—learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attention—may radically transform one’s life. Sam Harris

Day 2937, choice.

Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes 
I wonder the doors
where they are in me
if I could open
if I am already been
in the other room

Do I even have a key
or a choice

If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings,” said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by ‘free will.’ I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Day 2936, understand.

Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes 
I open the door
because it is a door

the world is simple
and hard
to understand

Every singular thing, or anything which is finite and has a determinate existence, can neither exist nor be determined to produce an effect unless it is determined to exist and produce an effect by another cause, which is also finite and has a determinate existence; and again, this cause can neither exist nor be determined to produce an effect unless it is determined to exist and produce an effect by another, which is also finite and has a determinate existence, and so on, to infinity. Spinoza

Day 2935, I feel that.

Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes 
I am determined
to throw this rock
through those windows

The great paradox of determinism and free will, which has held the attention of the wisest of philosophers and psychologists for generations, can be phrased in more biological terms as follows: If our genes are inherited, and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the environment. It would appear that our freedom is only a self delusion. E.O. Wilson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson

 

Day 2934, machine.

Daily picture, Quotes

Science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without. Owing to the similarity of our construction and the sameness of our environment, we respond in like manner to similar stimuli, and from the concordance of our reactions, understanding is born. In the course of ages, mechanisms of infinite complexity are developed, but what we call ‘soul’ or ‘spirit,’ is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this functioning ceases, the ‘soul’ or the ‘spirit’ ceases likewise.

I expressed these ideas long before the behaviorists, led by Pavlov in Russia and by Watson in the United States, proclaimed their new psychology. This apparently mechanistic conception is not antagonistic to an ethical conception of life. Nikola Tesla

Day 2933, we can only.

Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes 
I see a charged battery
at least
til I test it

I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will. The Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine philosophically. In that respect I am not a Jew… I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must*. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act as if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being. Albert Einstein

*Der Mensch kann wohl tun was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will. (Man can do what he wants, but he cannot want what he wants.)

Day 2932, a priori.

Daily picture, Quotes
 
We like to believe that all history is a halting and imperfect preparation for the magnificent era of which we are the salt and summit; but this notion of progress is mere conceit and folly. “In general, the wise in all ages have always said the same things, and the fools, who at all times form the immense majority, have in their way too acted alike, and done the opposite; and so it will continue. For, as Voltaire says, we shall leave the world as foolish and wicked as we found it.” In the light of all this we get a new and grimmer sense of the inescapable reality of determinism. “Spinoza says (Epistle 62) that if a stone which has been projected through the air had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own free will. I add to this only that the stone would be right. The impulse given it is for the stone what the motive is for me; and what in the stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity, is in its inner nature the same as that which I recognize in myself as will, and what the stone also, if knowledge were given to it, would recognize as will.” But in neither the stone nor the philosopher is the will “free.” Will as a whole is free, for there is no other will beside it that could limit it; but each part of the universal Will—each species, each organism, each organ—is irrevocably determined by the whole.
 
Everyone believes himself a priori to be perfectly free, even in his individual actions, and thinks that at every moment he can commence another manner of life, which just means that he can become another person. But a posterior, through experience, he finds to his astonishment that he is not free, but subjected to necessity; that in spite of all his resolutions and reflections he does not change his conduct, and that from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he must carry out the very character which he himself condemns, and as it were, play the part which he had; undertaken, to the very end. Arthur Schopenhauer, from Wille Durants The Story of Philosophy

Day 2930, freedom.

Daily picture, My thoughts

The problem of free will. We had no say in who we are, what our character is, and where our upbringing has pushed us. We glide on a slide down to our end, and only the wiggle room between the sides of the slide gives us the impression that we have free will.

We will no longer condemn each other for having red hair, being gay, or being a woman. One day, we will no longer condemn each other for our other traits. There will no longer be a right way to live, and the only boundary will be the freedom of others to live their lives fitting the way they are. Society will no longer blame the drunken driver; it will only take away their driver’s license in the same way that someone with a contagious disease gets quarantined. Life will still not be fair, but our political way of living is no longer up for debate; it will have no value and should be contested in the same way we contest our choice of clothing. 

People who don’t believe in free will will see a future like this. And where is the choice to make this change in you and society, you might ask? It has to be similar to the process of emancipating women. It will go slowly, but people will accept it over time, and no one person or idea will tip the scale.