ludimagister

I do not believe in free will. I believe that causality is unrestricted, and that there is no uncaused cause. But, I do not believe in unfree will either.

The usual reasoning follows along these lines: If I conceive of my body as a system; causality demands that its behavior is determined by external causes, internal states, and the laws of physics. Since there is no uncaused cause to change the internal states arbitrarily (i.e. that we don’t have souls), and the laws of physics are fixed; the external causes seem to be the determining factor of the system. Hence, we conclude that we don’t have free will, that our future is determined by our external circumstances, that our wills are unfree.

If you want to see the problem with this sort of reasoning, you should continue a step further by considering what happens with regards to the rest of the cosmos. You can make the exact same argument and arrive the absurd conclusion that the rest of the cosmos is unfree from you, and that its behavior is determined by you.

This is not something to become misty eyed about, it just shows the fallacy of the kind of reasoning we used.

The cosmos is one, and we are a part of it. We are not distinct from the laws of physics, we are manifestations of those laws. There is no free will or unfree will. There is only will—which can be understood as the subjective aspect of causality, not something distinct from it.

In my view, the free will debate illustrates us our misapprehensions about ourselves.