THE ISSUE OF 'FREE WILL'

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 CLARIFYING THE ISSUE OF “FREE WILL”

It seems to me, that the long-raging debate between “free will” and determinism is unusually marred by unresolved semantic differences. What one side of the fence is trying to convey, often never makes it across the fence, and thus the issues raised in the debate, are seldom properly addressed. I would, in this post, like to clarify some of these semantic issues, so people can avoid their pitfalls, and engage in productive discussion concerning this matter.
What will be a primary focus here, is the way various people define “free will”, and how this affects the debate. First however, I would like to clarify a point about determinism.
Determinists contend, that the universe, at least as far as we know, operates according to the laws of cause and effect, and thus, everything is predetermined (which is different, I might add, from arguing that everything is predictable). While not the central tenet of determinism, a natural outgrowth of this perspective is the idea that “free will” is a myth, and “choice” is but an illusion.
The first thing we need to recognize then, is that not everybody defines “free will” as being indeterminant. In fact, many definitions of “free will”, do not specifically address the issues raised by determinism, and so it’s often unclear, whether a given definition of “free will” is compatible with determinism or not.
For example, many Objectivists and “post-Objectivists” (people who have abandoned Objectivism as a whole, but still maintain many Objectivist notions), define “free will” as (something along the lines of) “the ability to think and form concepts”. Personally, I have never heard of a determinist who does not recognize the human ability to think and form concepts. There is nothing about this particular definition then, that is specifically antithetical to determinism. However, Objectivists (like Ayn Rand) and post-Objectivists (like Stefan Molyneux), often speak with great virulence against determinism. As a result, it is unclear (to me at least) whether:
a) Objectivists and post-Objectivists (Os and POs) even know what determinism is (what the actual position held by determinists is),
b) Whether Os and POs ARE or are not determinists themselves (despite what they claim),
c) Whether or not Os and POs consider our “choices” to be the EFFECTS of prior CAUSES, or
d) Whether or not Os and POs have ever bothered to address the issues raised by determinists, despite claiming to disagree with determinists.
I will come back to this issue in a bit.
I’ve also heard people define “free will” as “the ability to make choices”. This definition, once again, does not address the issue raised by determinists, and so it is unclear whether or not such a definition is compatible with determinism. What needs to be clarified, is what a “choice” actually is, and whether or not a choice is the effect of a prior cause (or prior causes).
Two good questions to ask, when confronted with this sort of ambiguity are as follows:
“When you describe our ‘will’ as being ‘free’, what do you believe it is FREE FROM? Do you, or do you not, believe that the ‘will’ is FREE FROM the laws of cause and effect?”
Some people of course (such as Daniel Dennet) DO in fact define “free will” as being “indeterminant” or at least “to some degree undetermined”. Such definitions, are clearly incompatible with determinism. This is where the REAL debate lies.
Most often (at least in intellectual circles), people who argue that our will is “undetermined”, make some sort of appeal to quantum mechanics. In some cases however, some people make appeals to concepts like “God” or “the soul”. As it were, EVEN IF gods and souls were real things, we would STILL know absolutely nothing relevant or verifiable about what such things were and and how they function. As such, such things are simply irrelevant to the discussion. At least when it comes to Quantum Mechanics, we know a little something about it, and thus have “something to go on”. QM is something we can discuss in a meaningful way.
Let me return now to the issue of Os and POs. What’s important to understand about Os and POs is this:
Many Os and POs believe (despite any contrary evidence found in dictionaries) that any given word can ONLY have ONE definition, and the way that THEY define any given word is the “correct”/”right”/”true” way of defining it, whether or not their own definition is commonly recognized or found in any dictionary. In other words, if you define a term differently than they do, they believe you have made an “error”. In their own minds, it’s as if you have declared that 2+2=5. As such, Os and POs are often incapable of evaluating an argument based on it’s intended MEANING. Rather, they can only evaluate an argument in terms of how it SOUNDS. This often causes them to not only straw-man people, but to straw-man people they actually AGREE with. Allow me to illustrate this point with an example.............