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Unidian writes:
Free will doesn't work from any logical perspective. No matter where our thinking starts, if it is honest and complete, we end up with determinism.
I think this is the wrong place to end up, and rather the right place to start. Determinism itself is not the fullest description of the human reality, and the word "free" in the free will/determinism debate - when recast - says something perhaps more important than its religiously-debated (and assumedly extra-causal) counterpart.
Sartre might have said it "condemned to choose," but just as well is this arrived to through the determinist scheme. We don't have a choice but to have to choose - every advancing step of our existence, even and especially whether to stay alive or not at all. We are caused to choose, what and how to direct our human becoming. And being as humans are never in a state of Being, but in one of
becoming, we have a lot of choosing to do, or avoid (this latter a choice in itself).
Now if you want to talk about those autonomic mechanisms that also advance every step of our becoming that we do not apparently choose (i.e. breathing, defecating, sensory transmission, etc.), then you have located what you have in common with mammals. That's fine and stuff, but few philosophers have had interest in expending their time there. No, it is the human experience and Interpretation of the Reality that we've been crapping on about for centuries.
Reason (shall we say consciousness?) has always been the philosopher's stone.
Having arrived to consciousness, the hard determinist will explain to you that everything that goes on in that world in your head is fully caused of course, but the hard determinist does not countenance any given unit of consciousness as having any conscious control of that world. (So, consciousness, apparently, is not conscious, or at least, very efficacious) When the hard-determinist speaks of everything you think or do being caused, he assumes that "you" do not have anything to do with it, as many are fond of reminding that there is no "you" anyway. Consciousness, to the hard-determinist, is just the clearinghouse of all sensory input and internal processes of any given [human] organism. You think what you think purely because you are caused to, even though there is no you in the first place to direct or receive this thinking. Multiple forces out of your control have assembled you into thinking you are a you, but really, you're not. The sense of self is a false sense, brought about by the very organism that you are actually not, but that nevertheless maintains that sense for some particular reason . . . .
I'm getting a whiff of the limitations to this sort of thinking, aren't
you? Does this philosophy as an end in itself most accurately describe your lived experience?
Additionally, neither my lived experience nor my reason leads me to believe that this world inside my head (of which "I" am apparently no part of) has a cap on it. At no time do I perceive myself to be conscious of everything, nor do I perceive that I can ever become conscious of everything. My awareness tells me that there is no determinate limit to awareness - it can go on and on and morph into this and that and affect thus and those, ad infinitum. At no time do I stop becoming, or becoming aware, nor do I ever stay in any given state of being. Without an end-cap upon consciousness, the hard determinist can only point to the mechanism of my understanding (cause/effect, of which apparently, "I" am no part), but can advance nothing further about that understanding itself, but to say it was caused. This is an impoverished place to cease one's thinking.
It is also an invitation to avoid dealing with the lived experience, and philosophy has always been vulnerable to attack for this. Determinism tells me I am not a me (I'm only caused to think that); hence, I am not a cause in, of, or for myself; that I do not make choices, but merely react to things; and that the most important thing to note about consciousness is that its all causation. In one fell swoop, I (who doesn't really exist) have a visa to conclude my thinking with causation itself; to dismiss my lived experience as a self as pure "delusion"; and to not bother honing my choice-making skills, because "I"'m not in control of them anyway; they're illusory; there's nothing to choose and nothing/no one to hone. Any sense of agonizing I have experienced over making a choice was probably just the hard-drive crunching away until it delivered "me" the commensurate reaction. And finally, hard determinism refuses to acknowledge the for-itself nature of human consciousness, unlike the for-itself, which is smart enough to know it's been
determined that way.
You don't have a choice about having to make choices; and you are not free
from having a will, and the only sense in which the word "free" can be recovered in this debate is if it's recast as an expression of the singular isolation of the for-itself being. "Free" would be better expressed
abandoned, in this isolated, for-itself condition. There is no escape from it, but the end of its existence itself. It is forced to make its way through the world, choosing again and again what will be
for itself.
It is from that point that we philosophize. I wish I had a nickel for every philosophy that's come down the pike, addressing the suffering of
us by rationalizing
us away. A little like Nietzsche, I envision a time when humans can qwitcher bitching and buck the fuck up and deal and create with their lived existences. what a cowardly, timorous, animal we mostly are; one who flinches at every suffering and pain, flinches at most of its lived reality by conceptually dissolving it, and itself, away. This, or scurrying under nice big safe philosophic rocks like this one, and in bad faith, passively outgassing the rest of their existences.
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