Freewill: Merely an Illusion

Standing at the crossroads of a decision can be a daunting thing, other times a choice might be made in an instant and not given a second thought. This idea of being able to choose our own paths in life, or freewill, means that every decision we make is up to us. While you may be influenced by your environment and your upbringing, the choices you make are said to be yours and yours alone. Literally every waking moment of someone’s life seems to contain the task of making a decision; most people only attribute choices to larger life events such as choosing one job over another, or dating this person instead of that person. The idea that will be proved true by this paper, on both scientific and religious grounds, is that freewill is merely an illusion.

            Chemical reactions are responsible for everything around you. This paper is made from wood mixed with various chemicals heated until they bond together. The ink used to print the very words being read is made from a chemical reaction. As any high school graduate can tell you, humans are the same as this paper and ink in that we are made up of chemicals, although much more complex than most other things, we are chemicals none the less. Since we are nothing but chemicals, our movements, our actions, our thoughts, can all we chalked up to simple chemical reactions. This is a complex topic, so an example is in order. You wake up and go into the kitchen to get some breakfast. You reach your hand up to your cupboard and grab a box of cereal, pull it down, and sit it on the counter. Now, if you were to ask, most people would tell you that what caused your arm to reach up and grab the box of cereal was that you thought about grabbing the cereal and the muscles in your arm stretched outward and grabbed it. If we dig deeper though, we find that what caused the muscles to move was electric stimulation sent by the neurons in your brain, through the nervous system, and into the muscles in your arm. The mystical brain is nothing more than neurons firing electrical signals, nonstop, from the creation of the brain, to its death. If our personalities, choices, aspirations, and emotions all come from our brain, which is purely electrical signals, then it would seem that we have no more control over what we do than a circuit in a computer. It is almost like the big bang set up the initial conditions, and human life and everything before it is just the playing out of subatomic particles according to basic fundamental physical laws.

            There was a study done by physiologist Benjamin Libet dealing with supposedly conscious decisions made by humans. Libet asked volunteers to choose random moments to flick their wrists while he measured the associated changes in their brains. To determine when the subject felt the intention to move, he asked them to watch the second hand of a clock and report its position when they felt that they had the conscious will to move. Libet found that the unconscious brain activity leading up to the conscious decision by the subject to flick their wrist began approximately half a second before the subject consciously felt that they had decided to move (Wikipedia Para. 38-39). Libet's findings suggest that decisions made by a subject are first being made on a subconscious level and only afterward being made into a conscious decision, and that the subject's belief that it occurred at the moment of their choice was only due to their perspective looking back on the event. This study offers up proof that decisions we think we are consciously and actively making, are actually being made before we even realize it.

            Someone who objects to the aforementioned statement might make a rebuttal on the grounds of quantum mechanics. They might use their knowledge of contemporary physical theory and say that quantum particles are seemingly random, and the reactions that occur are nothing more than a probability. Furthermore it could be argued that there is some sort of magical ‘X’ factor that has worked its way into the equation of life; most likely the product of the idea of the soul and the unknown that some believe exist within everyone, and cause everyone to be interconnected. The argument brought about by phenomenologists might be brought into the picture; “Since the future has not yet been determined, we can realistically anticipate ourselves in several possible futures and not only one.” (Sokolowski 73) In essence this is saying that the reason we are able to imagine ourselves into various future paths and not just one is because the future has not yet been determined, and the decisions that guide each person down the path of their life has not yet been established.

The response to this person would be to say, much like Richard Linklater did on this very topic in his movie Waking Life; the idea that if we are to believe in the quantum theory instead of just believing in chemical reactions, then we are saying that all our “freewill” really is, is just the random swerving of particles in a chaotic system. Linklater says that he would rather be a gear in a big deterministic physical machine than be nothing more than a figure of probability and chance (Linklater). In other words, even if the theory behind quantum mechanics is proven true, which in all reality will be very difficult to do, it means that instead of your choices being laid out since the beginning of time by physical laws, your decisions are actually nothing more than the roll of a die. Even if this rebuttal is carried through and proven true, freewill is still nothing more than a figment of your imagination as the saying goes, which ironically, is not your imagination at all. As for the idea of the soul; that falls in, for the most part, with the idea of religion, and will be discussed next.

            In most religions, with perhaps the exception of Buddhism, there is a God, or multiple Gods, often said to be all knowing. For commonality sake, we will use the religion of Christianity since it is most common in the American culture. Religious folk as far back as Saint Thomas Aquinas, and probably even earlier have wondered, how can we really have a freewill if God is all knowing, and therefore knows all that has been and all that will be.  “While everyone was marveling at all that Jesus did, he said to his disciples, ‘Listen carefully to what I am about to tell you: The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into the hands of men.’” (Bible: New International Version, Luke 9.44) There are many other passages in the bible much like this one. If Jesus, who is believed by many to be God in human form, knows that he will be betrayed before it ever happens, that goes along with the idea that God is all knowing. If God knows every action you are going to take, then how can you really have freewill? This idea begins to play greatly into the idea of fate. There is actually a branch of Christianity called Calvinism that believes that God predestined some people to go heaven, and some to go to hell. How this blatantly obvious reversal of almost all of the principles of Christianity can still be considered a Christian viewpoint is beyond me, however I am not a theologian, so I cannot profess an immense knowledge of the topic.

            In response to this argument, some might say that nearly the entire bible talks about freewill. Our choice about whether we believe, or have faith, that there is a God, and that we have the freewill to worship him. By the same token, humans also have the right to turn away from God, mock him, or blaspheme against Him. The argument of one of the most well known stories in all of history could also be brought into the equation. Genesis 2:16-17 states, “And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.’” It is widely known that Eve ate a fruit from the tree and then offered it to Adam, which he also ate, even thought he knew it went directly against the decree of God.

The response to this person would be to ask how they know that God had not predestined Adam and Eve to eat the fruit from the forbidden tree. Although God “gives” you the freewill to choose not to worship him, how is it that anyone knows whether God just had not chosen someone who did not follow him as an individual who is destined to go to hell? It could have been God’s plan all along for Adam and Eve to eat the fruit from the tree, thus condemning them and all of mankind to the unkind fate of death, and the possible atrocities that wait in hell.

Freewill is merely an illusion that humans like to think they have. However, mankind should not dwell so heavily on such questions as the idea of freewill, for there is nothing that can be done about it. If the  proposition set forth in this paper holds true it would readily create a hollow victory, for although the idea of freewill will have been debunked, the previous statement will be held true, which will make the already insignificant existence of humans all the more meager.

Work Cited

Bible: New International Version. New York: Zandervan, 1999.

Linklater, Richard, dir. Waking Life. 2001. DVD. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2007.

Sokolowski, Robert. Introduction to Phenomenology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 3 June 2007. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 11 June 2007.