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Saturday, 17 November 2018


Arguments against 'free will' based on the causal completeness of the physical world only point to the inadequacies of the concepts used to frame them. In one sense free-will is not a purported property of something but a mode of relation between an organism and its environment. If the degrees of freedom in the repertoire of responses matches or exceeds the degrees of freedom of the environmental stimuli then there is practical freedom even without the need of invoking a will. The behaviour of an individual ant is limited and stereotyped, and can easily be exhausted by unfamiliar obstacles, but that of a colony shows a startling ability to respond to many different kinds of challenge. On a higher level the limitations of an individual species are transcended by the evolution of new species with unpredictable new abilities in meeting new obstacles. In this sense life is free in relation to all the possible changes in its environment as long as these permit it to exist. Additionally, freedom lies not merely in the unpredictability of the responses but in their appropriateness, as if there is an open-ended conversation or game being played between agent and situation. To invoke a 'will' as the kernel of such freedom is not to bring in a metaphysical mystery but to transpose the context into human reality where the relation called freedom becomes the relation of consciousness and world, the ability to meaningfully respond to every different kind of perceived situation - even if the response is to refrain from acting. Indeed, freedom is the ability to refrain from any given conditioned behaviour from purely 'internal' motives - like the Underground Man's refutation of any utopia. So it is impossible to disprove 'freedom of the will' until you can fully account for consciousness. In practice the whole argument is less metaphysical than ideological, and it would be enough to show that a belief in free will is positively correlated with a larger repertoire of responses to life-challenges.

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