This kind of thing comes up all the time and I figured it was about time I talked about it because I tend to disagree with determinism on a certain scale and a lot of people just don’t like that.

So let’s have a conversation.I think it’s pretty clear that soft determinism is reasonable. Soft determinism is the idea that determinism and free will are compatible whereas hard determinism is the state of free will being ultimately impossible because all of one’s actions are completely determined by one’s environment.

The problem is, that makes no sense. You only have to look around you. Clearly, we have at least the illusion of free will, depending on how you’re going to define free will, which is where most discussions on free will go horribly, horribly wrong. In most instances, people are talking about completely different things when it comes to free will and that’s why most of those discussions go nowhere worthwhile. If everyone were to agree to the ground rules first, which unfortunately rarely happens, we might actually get somewhere.

So let’s start off with a definition. For me, free will is the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate and the ability to act at one’s own discretion. You get to choose what you do from among an available list of things that can be done. You can’t pick things which are logically inconsistent or physically impossible. Those are not options available to you. Yet for the rest, our experiences every day seem to suggest that we can, in fact, exercise that kind of free will.

Often, this gets us into an ice cream shop, so let’s go there. The claim of the hard determinist is that we can only make decisions programmed into us by nature. If we had sufficient understandings of the motion and interaction of every single atom since the moment of the Big Bang, we could accurately predict the actions of every individual across trillions of years of time.

And I call bullshit.

See, there is no way to actually verify any of this. If you walk in for some ice cream and you have, say, 30 flavors to choose from, in theory, you could choose any of them. Let’s discount those you like more than others, just to keep the field as wide as we can. So, according to the hard determinists, you don’t really have a choice. Your choice has already been made for you, and for the most extreme of them, that choice was made 13.7 billion years ago. Yet how do you prove that? We know that we cannot rewind time and see if another choice is possible, but I can go and buy anything I want, for any reason I want, and there is no apparent limitation to my ability to choose.

I could, in fact, choose to buy something that is dangerous. If I had a deadly peanut allergy, I could purchase peanut butter ice cream, made with real peanuts, knowing full well I’d die if I ate it. That takes evolution out of the picture. In fact, it takes absolutely any kind of hard determinism out of the picture unless you’re willing to give in to blind faith and I don’t do that. If you can’t prove it, it’s not a rational position to hold. You can’t get from here to there intellectually, with evidence aforethought. Therefore, it’s just not worth believing.

The hard determinists can come back when they have something objective to present, which means we’ll never hear from them again. I’m actually okay with that. How about you?