Here is what the band Rush has to say on the matter of free will….
But then, do they in a later album contradict themselves within these lyrics?
So, now let us examine a couple of terms and definitions that are often argued and contemplated when philosophizing about freewill.
Pre-Determinism: the idea that the entire past (as well as the future) was determined at the origin of the universe.
Casual Determinism: Causal determinists believe that there is nothing in the universe that is uncaused or self-caused.
The basic scientific idea of hereditary determination fulfills the definition of causal determinism, a metaphysical concept.
Determinism: Determinism is the philosophical idea that every event or state of affairs, including every human decision and action, is the inevitable and necessary consequence of antecedent states of affairs.
Determination: Determination is the idea that our decisions are determined by our motives and deliberations, by our character and values, and by our feelings and desires. The idea that events (including human actions) can be adequately determined by immediately prior events (such as an agent’s reasons, motives, desires), without being pre-determined back to before the agent’s birth or even back to the origin of the universe.
the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one’s own discretion.
The photo meme above was one that was generated by one of those Facebook “find your quote of the year, made specially for you” sites….It is of value to this meandering…I would like to start here and work backwards through the definitions. The canvas analogy of this quote resonated in me as an Adoptee because in many ways I felt like a blank canvas with no reference picture, as I was not brought up around my birthfamily. I was floundering around as a child, always trying to fit in, trying to draw from those in my environment, but always knowing that the boxes I was trying to fit in to were not who I was deep inside. By high school and college, the true me, my true identity, emerged and it was very different from anyone I was raised around. When I finally got in touch with my birthfamilies, it was uncanny how much of the identity that I was so drawn to, that emerged despite never having met them until I was in my late 30s, was a perfect blend of my birthmom and birthdad. My identity seems to me (to use the terms within the confines of this argument), to be a casual determinism. In fact, no matter how hard my adoptive parents have tried to quash that identity, it has remained in tact, partially out of choice, partially because it is “who I was”, despite never knowing this on the conscious level at that time.
Moving along to the actual definitions and debate.
Back in college I took several social science classes, a variety of psychology classes, philosophy classes (even one of my math requirement classes was a blended math/philosophy class), sociology, social psychology etc….I will admit it has been some time since I have read up on the classic Philosophers, and unfortunately, due to my ADHD, one of my coping techniques was to purge the info I learned for each exam in order to learn the info for the next exam. Sadly, I have not retained much of my knowledge. So, what I put forth may not be factually accurate and may have already been covered by someone, and I may be behind the game on this one. I am only beginning to re-emerge in to the world of research and knowledge seeking, so please forgive any indiscretions and misinformation.
My opinion on free will simply boils down to what is stated in the above meme. “You are free to choose, but you are not free from the consequence of your choice.” I do believe that the definitions of the terms work in conjunction with each other, in the consecutive order that I listed them. I believe we do all have free will, that we are free to choose, and make any choice we want, but that our choices are influenced by all of the factors (Pre-Determinism, Casual Determinism, Determinism and Determination). We ultimately have to answer to our own minds (as that is the main jail cell we are stuck in 24/7), and then there is the other barrage of possible consequences, depending upon what the choice to be made is. Those who are religiously minded have the fear of their higher power looking over them as a consequence. There is fear of losing some type of relationship as a possible outcome. Fear of losing income, or a job. Somehow, free will seems to coincide with a decision between something that could possibly be beneficial and something that could potentially be harmful or negative in some way. There always seems to be that “what if” chance on the other side of free will. Do I have the free will to leave my house right now and go for a drive in my car? Absolutely. No one is stopping me. Someone else might choose to do so under the given circumstances. Nothing really bad happened. Just some negative energy. Could getting out the house right now possibly be beneficial? Maybe. Would it really do much harm? No. My daughter just went up to go to bed. My husband is home. I wouldn’t be endangering anyone. But it also raises the risk of me getting in to a car accident by being on the road later at night. There really aren’t any places for me to go other than bars at this point, and I’m not a drinker. So what is the benefit? Not much. Options are weighed and there seems less benefit to it than it is worth. But do I have the free will? Yes. Could I exercise it if I choose to? Yes. I choose not to (even though it was really only a hypothetical situation that I came up with merely for this mental experiment). And I still have made a choice not to have to decide, as Rush points out in their song.
Regardless of any one person’s decision, the world will still keep on turning, until the day it doesn’t. So everyone is free to decide however they choose. But they are not free from the consequences (good or bad) of those choices. Even if one person is the reason for the final act that causes the extinction of the world as we know it, there will always be acts and people involved in those steps leading up to it that played their role. No person is ever a complete lone soldier in their mission.
As with many people, binge watching TV shows has become “one of my things”. God bless the Netflix and Hulu! The difference between me and alot of other people is that I am very particular about the shows and movies that I chose to watch. I generally don’t watch much “mindless” tv. Most things I chose to watch have some relation to my life and some deeper meaning that I can grow and learn from.
One of my latest is the TV series “Perception”. It appeals to the social sciences deep thinking side of me.This side is a very dominant side. If I wasn’t a musician by career, I would have gone in to Psychology. In high school, when I was visiting the college fairs in my sophmore year, I was putting down on all of the cards that my intended major was Psychology and my intended minor was Music. One of the college representatives asked me if I had heard about Music Therapy which was a combination of my major and minor. By the time I got to my senior year of high school, that would be my intended major for college. Long story short, and this will be a longer story for another post (because it is quite the story in an of itself), I ended up becoming a Music Performance Major while in college. I took many social science classes, however, during my undergraduate work. And I still have an exuberant interest in all social sciences. I am a very unique private lessons instructor in my approach, in that, I utilize a lot of social science techniques in my teaching, as well as my students often confiding in me as a counselor because they take comfort in our relationship and can feel the stretch of my knowledge beyond music.
I often feel that I am more conscious than the majority of people I come across. But often, I feel I come across to others as a bit insane or overly eccentric because my emotions and self esteem are very inchoate due to the situations and circumstances I have gone through in this lifetime in order to obtain that wisdom. The greatest minds run a fine line between genius and insanity, so perhaps that is a good sign.
For my daughter, it is not her life circumstances that cause her emotions to be inchoate, but rather her innate genius brain. That is the paradoxical mind of someone with Asperger’s. It is as if one is so overdeveloped and firing at such a rapid rate that the other is also firing at such a rapid rate that it also misfires or doesn’t connect the proper emotion with the proper situation. Everything is just going a mile a minute up there for her. The intellectual information seems to organize itself, but the emotional stuff doesn’t. Either way, we both struggle with the emotional area and how to properly appropriate it.
A thought came to my mind the other day. We are given all of these emotions in life for a reason. Many from my generation (I am 40) were brought up under the belief to control your emotions, hold back on all the negative emotions such as anger, sadness etc…we were not permitted to express our opinions to our elders, our elders were always right….even if they were wrong. We were an oppressed generation emotionally and we were not respected as individuals. The old saying of “children are meant to be seen and not heard” was often said or implied when we were children. And as parents, my generation has gone to the opposite extreme and become a little too loosey-goosey and allowed the children to walk all over the authority figures whereas they think they run the households now. The perception of authority shifted and has changed the reality of the way of life. Hopefully the next generation will find the right balance.
But the thought that came to me was that I have realized that I seem to function with different people from different emotion banks. It is different emotions that drive me to make changes within different relationships in my life. I try to tell my daughter that it is always ok to have the gambut of emotions, but it is how she handles them and reacts to them as to whether it makes them “ok”. IE: It is ok to feel angry, but it is not ok to punch someone because you are angry, etc….But what I am noticing, at least for myself, and I’d be curious to know if other people experience this same phenomenon, is that sometimes the necessary impetus of change for me to make a paradigm shift is based in different emotions for different relationships. But this, unfortunately causes me to switch in negative emotions. And I don’t know how to break this. For example. It is anger or hurt that finally drives me to make the necessary boundary changes I need to with my adoptive parents. This is a positive change that I am always in need of, but I lose the courage to do this, unless I swarm myself with a million reasons to be angry and hurt by them enough to convince myself of why I need to put up these boundaries. I have to make myself miserable in order to make a healthy change for myself. It sounds so self-defeating, but I chicken out if I don’t do this ritualistic barrage of hurtful input information until I finally make my move. I want to stop hurting myself, but I can’t seem to find another way to muster up the courage.
If anyone has any suggestions, I am all ears. I am still in the inchoate stages of my redefinition of self. But I leave with the following quotes from the show “Perception” which cause me to feel that I will continue to function in similar patterns.
A very common philosophy problem/argument. If no one is aware that the tree has made the sound, does the sound in fact occur? Some have answered the question stating that it would not make a sound. Their reasoning for this is that sound is something that only occurs in a human ear when something (air or object) is set in motion. Therefore, if no one is in the vicinity to observe with an ear, to input the motion of the tree, the the tree would not in fact make a sound.
However, the tree will make a noise (which is a hearable noise), even if no one is around to hear it. The noise would be hearable IF someone was around to hear it.
Sometimes we, as a human nature characteristic, become frantic when we get caught up in our desperation to solve our problems when everything seems to be going wrong. We start trying to fix every single thing and begin trying to change everything in our midst. We respond with frustration and anger and turn everything in to a huge philosophical problem that, like the tree making a sound question, we go around and around with and see no end or solution. Sometimes, we need to stop asking the questions, and stop trying to fix everything and work towards acceptance. If we constantly focus on all things negative in our lives, that is what we will continue to dwell on. In doing this, a negative cyclical pattern emerges.
Conversely, pondering the first meme posted on this writing….Sometimes, when you simply surrender, and quiet yourself, answers will appear. Even when you have not asked a specific question, or if you have asked a very generalized question a very long time ago and stopped searching for the answers, often times something will come along in your life and you will not even realize that was the key or one of the components that was missing. That was one of the turning points when it wasn’t ever something on your radar when you had tried so very hard to change everything that you thought was plaguing you.
Or when you’re Sheldon Cooper from the “Big Bang Theory” and your formulas or theories “just won’t coalesce”. Sometimes after pounding formulas or thought processes from the approach you think it should logically come from for what seems like forever, when you’re on the brink of giving up, maybe you have given up, and suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, the answer itself, or the method for solving the problem comes to you.
My music research project illuminated a problem with an answer to a question I was never even asking in the first place. I saw the answer first which made me ask the question next.
If there is no question, or if you are not asking the right question, is there an answer? What is the answer called if the answer came before the question? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? All of the problems and solutions the thinkers of the world grapple with frantically, until they decide not to.