Most discussions about free will become complete clusterfucks, mostly, I’m convinced, because everyone is talking past everyone else. It’s just happened yet again so I thought it was a good opportunity to put down some thoughts about why I think free will, at least as I’m going to define it, exists and why hard determinism is such a waste of time.See, there seems to be a lot of people who are convinced that, if you just had an accurate enough understanding of the instant of the Big Bang, you could predict absolutely everything that ever happened in the universe without the possibility of error. We’re all just puppets that are going about our lives, doing whatever the random maneuverings of atoms have predicted that we’ll do.

Granted, that makes it sound like there’s some intelligence or purpose involved and most of the people I talk to about this, they’re almost all atheists without exception and the moment I point this out, they start to exclaim “oh no, that’s not how it works!” but they don’t seem to have a clue how it actually works.

Here’s the problem. If we do live in a hard deterministic world, where everything is just the actions of atoms set in motion just under 14 billion years ago, it makes no sense at all that we’d see the kind of orderly activity that we observe every single day. Everything would be beholden to that initial atomic state. Evolution couldn’t function because there could be no selection mechanism because there’s nothing else operating except atoms and their underlying physical laws. Chemicals form based on the inherent scientific laws of our universe and we just go on from there.

Do you understand just how absurd that sounds? It gets far worse when you realize that means all human activities have to be explained the same way. Because of the way the atoms that currently make up my body are interacting and moving at this precise second, I have no choice but to write this blog post exactly as I am writing it. Every letter I hit on the keyboard forms a comprehensible word or sentence or paragraph. Amazing how that works.

You, of course, have no choice but to read what I’m saying. You have no free will either. You are forced by your atomic makeup to be sitting in front of a screen or holding a phone and reading this blog. Amazingly, what I write, it’s in a language that you find comprehensible, hopefully at least, because I know there are people who don’t understand English, but it’s not coming out in complete gibberish, just the random actions of random atoms that have been bouncing around for nearly 14 billion years. All of this was predestined from the moment of the Big Bang and couldn’t conceivably been any different.

Every thought in your head, why is it remotely coherent? There’s no logical reason for your neurons to fire in any kind of organized or comprehensible way. That is made even more ludicrous by considering hard determinism at all rational or possible. In the experience that we have, things just don’t work that way.

Now maybe what we interpret as free will is all an illusion, I don’t know. It certainly doesn’t seem that way and the people who run around pretending that everything is a predetermined mess, why in the world would they get online and debate other people if that’s what they really believed? I mean other than the “fact” that they have no choice and we’re all going through a complex dance of actions that we have no control over.

So as I said, this came up today in yet another discussion where I used my typical example of free will. For the record, my definition is any action that you can take for which you could have made another choice. This being the middle of a heat wave and 107 out at the moment, I used a standard tactic. If you walk into an ice cream shop, can you choose from among any of the available flavors or are your choices restricted?

Of course, rational people know that if there are 101 flavors, you can walk out with any of them, at least in theory. You may not like all of them, you might have preferences that you’d choose over others, but you could pick any of them. Of course, one person argued that he would only buy what he liked, but that’s preference not possibility. The simple fact is, I could walk up and order any of them and there’s nothing inherently limiting my options. I could even order things that would kill me. If I had a severe peanut allergy, I could purchase peanut butter ice cream. It would be bad if I ate it, but I could certainly order it and anyone who doesn’t see this is a complete idiot.

That tends to be the problem though. A lot of people who are strict hard determinists are, in fact, idiots. They are like the religious. They believe on faith and that’s where getting into these discussions tends to go horribly wrong because you tend to get massively downvoted and insulted if you dare disagree with the blind faith. These are people who cannot debate in good conscience. These are people who freak out and start tossing insults the second you disagree with their childish conclusions. Because this really is childish if you notice, these are the same kinds of people who cling to hard solipsism

I think I understand why this happens though. These are people who are desperately trying to distance themselves from personal responsibility. If you have no choice, then nothing they do is their fault. They can’t be held accountable if they have no other options. It’s why a lot of people cling to these ridiculous notions, because they’re allowing emotions to get in the way of their intellect. That is far too prevalent these days, unfortunately.

So what do you think? Are you in the hard determinist camp and how do you justify your position with what we observe in reality? Let me know in the comments. It certainly looks as though there is free will, but if you deny it or claim it’s an illusion, how do you demonstrate that? I can walk into any ice cream shop on the planet and prove my case. How about you?