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DOES FREE WILL EXIST?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2015

David Kyle Johnson
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Abstract

In ‘Do Souls Exist’, I suggested that, while the non-existence of the soul does threaten free will, the threat it possess is inconsequential. Free will faces so many other hurdles that, if those were overcome, the soul's non-existence would be a non-threat. In this paper, I establish this; and to do so, I define the common libertarian notion of free will, and show how neuroscience, determinism, indeterminism, theological belief, axioms in logic, and even Einstein's theory of relativity each entail that libertarian free will does not exist. I conclude by demonstrating why some philosophers reject alternate (compatibilist) understandings of free will, and so believe that the notion we are free is an illusion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Think , Volume 15 , Issue 42 , Spring 2016 , pp. 53 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2015 

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References

Notes

1 Bourget, D. & Chalmers, D., ‘What do Philosophers Believe?’, Philosophical Studies (2013), 1–36Google Scholar. http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl

2 Although, it should be noted, believing that we don't have libertarian free will is not the same thing as believing that the libertarian ‘definition’ of free will is incorrect. One may think that alternate possibilities are required if we are to be free, but simply believe that there are not alternate possibilities. I will discuss this further.

3 Bourget, D. & Chalmers, D., ‘What do Philosophers Believe?’, Philosophical Studies (2013), 1–36Google Scholar. http://philpapers.org/surveys/linear_most.pl

4 F. Newport, ‘More Than 9 in 10 Americans Continue to Believe in God’, Gallup.com (2011). http://www.gallup.com/poll/147887/americans-continue-believe-god.aspx

5 D. Casciani, ‘Census Shows Rise in Foreign-born’, BBC News UK (2012). http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-20677515

6 B. Duffy, ‘Ipsos Global Advisory: Supreme Being(s), the Afterlife and Evolution’, Ipsos (2011). http://www.ipsos-na.com/news-polls/pressrelease.aspx?id=5217

7 Nahmias, E., Morris, S., Nadelhoffer, T., and Turner, J., ‘Surveying freedom: Folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility’, Philosophical Psychology, no. 18 (2006), 561–584Google Scholar.

8 For a nice rundown of this literature, see J.A. Coyne's ‘Does the average person believe in determinism, free will, and moral responsibility’ on the Why Evolution Is True blog at http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/does-the-average-person-believe-in-determinism-free-will-and-moral-responsibility/

9 Manes, F., Sahakian, B., Clark, L., Rogers, R., Antoun, N., Aitken, M. and Robbins, T., ‘Decision-making processes following damage to the prefrontal cortex’, Brain, vol. 125, no. 3 (2002), 624–639CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/125/3/624.long

10 For a rundown of this literature, including links to the original research, see Dvorsky, George, ‘Scientific evidence that you probably don't have free will’, io9.com (2013). http://io9.com/5975778/scientific-evidence-that-you-probably-dont-have-free-will

11 In fact, some suggest that the passage of time (and the notion of a past, present and future) is an illusion; all moments in the block have equal status in all respects. No one moment in time is occurring, while others are past and others are future. All that exists is a relationship between such moments such that, for every moment in time, certain moments are past (relative to it) and certain moments are future (relative to it). But such destinations need not concern us because they don't matter for the threat to free will that this view poses.

12 If a future event is determined by present physical facts to occur, one could find a truthmaker for it in the present. But, as we have already seen, future human actions cannot be determined to occur by present facts if they are going to be free.

13 For more on these arguments, see Johnson, D.K., ‘God, fatalism and Temporal Ontology’, Religious Studies, vol. 45, no. 4 (2009), 435–454CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 For such explanations, see the lectures on relativity in my course for ‘The Great Courses’, Exploring Metaphysics. http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=4182

15 This follows from a basic rule of transitivity. If A co-exists with B, and B with C, then A co-exists with C.

16 In some cases it will involve drawing connections between many events, but a co-existence relation between any two spacetime events can be demonstrated.

17 This makes the Einsteinian Block World slight different than the one describe above; since simultaneity is relative, and there is no preferred reference frame, you can't have ‘three dimensional time slices – moments in time – collected together, in temporal order.’ The Einsteinian Block World is just a collection of spacetime related events and different reference frames will entail different ways to divide those events into ‘moments in time’ (i.e., into events that happen simultaneously). But the general idea is the same. Both kinds of block worlds are incompatible with free will, and for the same reason.