Are Choices an Illusion?
Section 1
Do I believe that the choices we make are just mere illusions? That we do not really have our own free will in making decisions? Yes, I believe this to be true.
Section 2 However, some believe that we do have free will. Roy F. Baumeister, a social psychologist states that we do have free will, and he says:
If culture is so successful, why don’t other species use it? They can’t—because they lack the psychological innate capabilities it requires. Our ancestors evolved the ability to act in the ways necessary for culture to succeed. Free will likely will be found right there—it’s what enables humans to control their actions in precisely the ways required to build and operate complex social systems.
(Baumeister).
What Baumeister is saying is that based on how our ancestor has developed a sense of communication is an act of free will. They have free will because they chose how they want to develop and how it will help them evolve. Baumesiter also states how our self-control "counts as a kind of freedom because it beings with not acting on every impulse," meaning that because of our free will, we don't always act straight away when we see something. We think about it first before we trigger a response. Such as thinking about what we say before we say it, we just don't say the first thing that comes to our mind without thinking about it. Steve Zara, a writer in the Richard Dawkins discussion section of the websites states that determinism "is not the enemy of free will, it's necessary for it. This seems utterly counterintuitive, but it's the wrong way to look at things. Determinism is not a prison that forces our choices, it's a framework that enables us to make choices." What Zara is trying to say is that determinism is necessary for free will, as others believe that because of determinism we don't have free will due to "predictable" outcomes. Just because our choices are predictable, does not mean we don't have a choice. Another person who believes we do have free will is John Horgan, a distinguished and widely published science writer. Horgan states that: Moreover, free will must exist, if some creatures have more of it than others. My teenage daughter and son have more free will—more choices to consider and select from—than they did when they were infants. They also have more than our dog Merlin does. I have (on my good days) more free will than adults my age suffering from schizophrenia or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Try telling prisoners or paraplegics that there is no free will, and that choices are illusory
(Horgan).
What Horgan is saying is since some creatures have more free will than others. Which means if certain creatures have more free will than others, then the only possible reason to believe is that there such thing as free will. Section 3 On the other end, many believe that we do not have free will. Robert Nielsen, a journalist argues that almost "all our decisions are based upon our circumstances. We do not have free will in the sense of being able to freely choose our life." Nielsen is trying to say that we make choices based on the circumstances in our life. We didn't choose to make the choice but because of the circumstances we are under, we had to make the choice. Therefore, we are lead to making that choice, meaning we didn't really make the decision under our own will. Sabine Hossenfelder, an assistant professor at Nordita, claims that it "doesn’t matter how you define 'you' (in the simplest case, think of a subsystem of the universe), 'you' won’t be able to influence the future because nothing can. Quantum indeterminism is not influenced by anything, and what kind of decision making is that?" Hossenfelder believes that free will only can exist if there are different possible futures and you are able to influence which one becomes reality. However, no matter how different you are and what differences you make, you cannot change the future because "nothing can". Another person who believes we do not have free will and it is just an illusion is Rebecca
Masset-Chase. She believes that: Our characters are determined by our genes, biology, environment, etc – all factors which are essentially beyond our control. We may take steps to change our situations, but this decision is a manifestation of characteristics in us which have been cultivated by the aforementioned factors: for instance, a decision to move house may be necessitated by one’s socio-economic situation. Consequently, I assert that our ‘choices’ are in fact illusions of choice, and that we therefore do not have free will. What she means is that we are influenced by our characteristic to make our decisions. All the decisions we make are based on the factors that currently affect our situation at hand, therefore the decision we make is not really by our own will.
Section 4 We like to believe that we make our own choices, but that is not possibly true. The reason being is that there are always other things influencing us to make the decision we made. There are unknown sources of influence that guides us to our decision but never tells us directly. We cannot really prove that the decision we have made was by our own free will. For example, I am currently going attending college, but this is not solely from choice.
Once I was the right age to attend kindergarten, I then began to attend school every day. I did not get a choice when this decision was made. I was simply attending school by the will of my parents. When in school I was taught by my teachers that I should attend college because it is the right decision to do. By the end of the day, I wanted to attend college, because if I did not, I felt like it was the wrong decision to make. However it was not really my decision, but because of the people that surrounds me influence me to make my decision. I believe that the choices we are given are usually base on the circumstances at hand.
When given the choices under said circumstances, we make the choice within our boundary. We cannot decide to do something that is out of our limit. We are limited to the choices we are allowed to make. We are deeply influenced by our surroundings. Can we ever actually claim to have made a free choice?
Section 5 Earlier on, I quoted Baumeister stating how he believes we have free will, due to the fact that our ancestors showed that they have free will by acting in a way that is necessary for them to succeed. However, I believe this is to be false. The reason being is just because they chose to act a certain way doesn't necessarily mean that they did it by their own free will. They could have done it because they had no other choices but that choice alone. Under the circumstances they were under, they had to act that way to survive, if they didn't, they would have died. They were influenced by the circumstances at hand to make that choice. He also avoids the "blank slatist" idea and recognizes that human abilities emerges from the remarkable cognitive systems that people have. He states clearly that these abilities do not rise up out of thin air but are the result of untold generations of evolution. Baumeister also claimed that our self-control is also a kind of "freedom", it shows that we have free will. Yes, our self-control stops us from acting on impulse, but can it be called free will just because we stop and think about something before we act it. For example, a person saw someone dropped their wallet, they can either decide to pick it up and keep it for their own, or tell the person they had dropped it. The right thing to do is to tell the person, but we were taught that it is the right thing to do, that stealing is bad. We were influence since the day we understood words that doing certain things is wrong. Can we really say that the choice we made was ours alone; or is it because of the fact that someone else had influence us to do so. In reply to what Steve Zara said, our brains go through the decision making process, and they do it on their own, but we can no more choose the answer anymore than a calculator whom has been asked what 2+2 equals. We have control over our body, in that we can make ourselves do things, however we have no power over what we "choose" to make them do. Free will means that given any decision, the answer is chosen by us, rather than being determined by the physics of our brains at that moment. In reply to John Horgan, yes we have more responses to stimuli than do dogs or any other creatures, however to say that some species have more complex behaviors than others says nothing at all in regards to the concept of "free will" with that of more complex relations between inputs and outputs. When we are hungry we go to a local fast food restaurant or the grocery store. However, does that display free will? Not really, it just shows that we have more varied tastes, and additionally developed the ability to process our environment in ways that pander to those taste. The more complex the species, the more decision it will seem to have. Be that as it may, that does not imply that those decisions are free. It implies that evolution has favored the acquisition and weighting of more and various types of environmental information that feed into behaviors. Works Cited
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Hossenfelder, Sabine. “Backreaction: You Probably Have No Free Will. But Don’t Worry about It.” Backreaction. N.p., 19 July 2013. Web. 3 Feb. 2015.
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