For me, the net result of reading this book has been a great simplification. A reduction of the free will question to a social and legal rather than a scientific or philosophical question – though, to be fair, that is not where Balaguer, a Californian philosopher by trade, leaves the matter. I might add that Balaguer, despite not being a man of faith himself, shows great respect for those who are, and for their beliefs; a greater courtesy than I would have shown, but perhaps an echo of the need to talk to the large Bible constituency if you want to get on in the US.
But to start at the beginning, it is clear that lots of what we do is managed subconsciously and cannot usefully be said to be a matter for free will at all.
It is also reasonably clear that lots of what we do is more or less forced upon us. In practice, I used to have to get up and go to work in the morning; there is, perhaps, free will here of a sort, but rather a poor sort.
Then, if something is not forced on us, is not determined, there is the possibility of chance. So suppose that something that I did could be shown to be a random event rather than one determined by me, by anyone or anything else. Random in the way, for example, that an electron might jump into this or that state, or not – or that some group of neurons might fire, or not. A bit implausible perhaps, but just suppose, for the sake of the argument – and what we would have, once again, is rather a poor sort of free will. And the fact that I might freely decide to use the toss of a coin to decide on some or other course of action does not disturb this poverty.
In an effort cut through all this, Balaguer then deploys the useful notion of a torn decision; a time when we have a number of options for action, actions between which we cannot decide as all of them seem to be equally valid. But somehow, we come up with a decision, a sort of decision which Balaguer calls torn because we are torn, consciously torn, between the various options. He suggests, I think quite reasonably, that if there is to be free will, then this is where it has to be. Furthermore, such decisions are not going to crop up that often; most of the time we are, and we need to be, on autopilot. Life is far too short to be taking conscious decisions the whole time, a notoriously slow and unreliable process.
There is much discussion about the aggregate determinism or not of neural processes (along the lines of statistical mechanics) and about whether we can detect what we think are free will decisions, torn decisions, in those neural processes rather before the event. That is to say that what we like to think of as free will is just a trick of the brain to make us feel good about ourselves. There are famous experiments which argue for this view and it is one to which I, for one, continue to subscribe. But ask google about a chap called Benjamin Libet to see for yourself. A virtual Nobel Laureate.
All of which leaves us without a very clear idea of what free will might amount to. But it seems that an ancient Scot, a chap called David Hume, perhaps best known for his magisterial history of England, came up with the answer hundreds of years ago. His succinct summing up was something like ‘if you get to do what you want to do, then you are exercising free will’. So in 1708, the Scots exercised free will by joining up with the English.
A summing up which sweeps away as irrelevant how you came to want to do whatever it was. All that tricky scientific and philosophical stuff. What is important is that you do want to do it and whether you do in fact do it. We can be quite confident that pretty much all of us want to do things and that sometimes we get to do them. And while we vary in how much free will we need, most of us will get cross quite quickly if we are not able to exercise free will reasonably often, say 5 or 10 times a day. Most of us need a bit of space in which to do our own thing.
And this, to a large extent is a social and legal question. I should be free, within sensible and practical bounds, to do my own thing. I should be allowed to choose what colour ice cream I want when I make it to the front of the queue in the interval at the theatre. But I am not free to break the law and if I do, it may be necessary to take me out of circulation for a while, for the protection of others – and perhaps myself. Possibly also for punishment if the judgement is that there was malice aforethought – such malice being enough for the lawyers and, I think, the priests – whether or not it amounts to free will for the psychologists.
I close with the thought that some of these last can specialise in helping people to have wants that they can decently exercise their free wills on.
PS: for a different view there is always wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will. A rather longer exposition of the matter than I offer here.
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