The definition of free will and to what extent we are free to act as we wish is something scientists and philosophers have wrestled with over centuries. Though there are many nuances in the different definitions of free will, neuroscientist Christof Koch outlines two primary schools of thought on the matter:
“According to what some call the strong definition of free will, articulated by Rene Descartes in the 17th century, you are free if, under identical circumstances, you could have acted otherwise. Identical circumstances refer to not only the same external conditions but also the same brain states. The soul freely chooses this way or that, making the brain act out its wishes, like a driver who takes a car down this road or that one. This view is the one most regular folks believe in.
“Contrast this strong notion of freedom with a more pragmatic conception called compatibilism, the dominant view in biological, psychological, legal and medical circles. You are free if you can follow your own desires and preferences. A long-term smoker who wants to quit but who lights up again and again is not free. His desire is thwarted by his addiction. Under this definition, few of us are completely free.” (Koch, 2012, p. 24)
Problems in defining free will
At some point, the task of defining free will boils down to a matter of how far back and how encompassing you want to take the argument. In this way, it’s very much like the irreconcilable differences surrounding the abortion debate. Highly religious people believe that life starts at the moment of conception, and so therefore even the morning after pill is seen as taking a life . . . a grave sin that involves someone interfering with God’s will and destroying a new soul. Yet there are also some religions that take this idea one step further, insisting that birth control is also a sin, since it prevents conception and therefore interferes with the will of God.
But by the same logic used for these other two arguments, one could reasonably take the inference one step further towards ideological purity, arguing that the church’s harsh attitudes towards sexuality are also “interfering with God’s will,” since they discourage young people from having sex and therefore destroy babies that would have been created under the more natural circumstances that God set forth for this Universe. After all, God quite apparently gave human beings both the means and the motivation to start creating babies in junior high school or even earlier, so one could make a sound argument that discouraging young people from having sex is in fact destroying souls and interfering with God’s will just as much as those other two actions do. Under this definition, the Catholic church and many other religions would become the most prolific abortionists of all time, since they interfere with “God’s will” that was imparted upon the natural world and human nature by shaming people into abstaining from sex long after God gave them the ability to conceive. It’s all a matter of where you choose to draw the line, and which facts you choose to pay attention to and which you choose to ignore.
The definition of free will suffers from the same problem. On the extreme end, some have argued that since our mind and thoughts are made of atoms, atoms which were sent into motion at the start of the Universe, then this means our past, present and future has already been pre-ordained and there’s nothing we can do at this point except sit back with some popcorn and watch it all unfold. Even if true, this definition of free will is entirely unhelpful. At the other extreme, most people ignore very real and documentable influences that shape people’s behavior and limit their freedom of choice. Much as religious people can claim interference with God’s will when it comes to birth control pills but conveniently ignore the contradiction this idea presents when it comes to interference of God’s will through shame and unnatural restrictions on sexuality, many of our ideas about the world conveniently ignore those inconvenient truths that govern people’s behavior: How past experiences shape the mind, how DNA creates each one of us uniquely, how the rich have more resources than the poor, how even the choice of whether you live or die can be determined by where one is born, and so on. Ignoring these influences lets us continue being judgmental and highly hypocritical, but it’s not a very accurate picture of the world.
A practical definition of free will
These pages will aim to give readers a practical concept of free will: one which recognizes the myriad of influences that go into human behavior while also working from the understanding that we are not merely powerless vessels awash in the Universe. We can recognize that behavior arises from a myriad of influences that restrict a person’s patterns of choice, while still recognizing that this doesn’t render them entirely powerless to change those patterns.
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